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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Melissa E replied. Had I considered clearing my cache?

​Er...  

​Thank you, Melissa.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sometimes I wake up and none of this happened. I wake up and we’re in the world we could have made. In this world, the internet brings us closer together; the news is rich and varied and always immediate; we’re forgiven the angry, judgemental, ridiculously -ist tweets of our adolescence. We don’t use social media to attack each other and/or obsess over a short list of recurring global issues; we have built personal media instead, to open ourselves up and share our individuality and thereby foster harmony. To know all is to forgive all, is that the saying? We have harnessed the power of technology to bring our inner children into the world.
 
We don’t live there, but we’re not far away. We’ve been lucky in an idiosyncratically human way. There was a time, in the early days of digital technology, when the workings of these new machines were beyond our understanding. Strangely – or perhaps inevitably, given human nature’s weakness for mystery – that drew us in. A whole generation accepted the complexity of the new technology as the price of the simplicity it seemed to offer. But it was as if, in return for mystifying us, we gave computers power over us. We wanted them to run our lives.
 
We mistake inscrutability for wisdom. For a time, computers ran everything: our healthcare systems; our transport infrastructure; our communications and our finances. Algorithms told policy-makers about human behaviour; databases updated doctors on our medical conditions; at the simplest level, even the judicial system automated itself – speeding fines, for example, were levied by machines on the evidence of automated cameras. Aircraft began to land themselves; empty trains travelled to where they would be needed. Machines oiled themselves in silent factories*.
 
We began to build self-driving cars and intelligent roads. We remembered the Turing Test, whereby a machine would pass as a human, and now we spoke of the Singularity, whereby a machine would surpass a human. We spoke of these more readily as milestones to be passed, than as dangers to be avoided. And as we spoke of the future, all the complexities of the present – of the machines; of the lives we had once lived – became hidden. Generations grew up for whom every task could be undertaken by the simple expedient of tapping a screen. 3D printers took over manufacture for us; intelligent assistants flipped every switch for us; machines not only ran but lived our lives for us.
 
Near-anarchy. And everything became argument. Detached now from the physical world, with no challenge left for us to face, with every creative achievement mediated by a machine, we sat at our screens projecting our own frustrations onto the world around us. We attacked each other as though other people were figments of a hostile “Them” that existed nowhere outside our own hazy sense of injustice; we defended our rights angrily, although they were not under threat except in our own minds, and many of us came to need the fight. It became a lightly done thing, a ready impulse, to sign up for a cause. Much good was done in those times, but at the price of a discontent that brought us to near-anarchy.
 
Then madness brought sanity. Suddenly, at the end of a short debate that was charged more by emotion than reason, prompted more by the MPs’ self-interest than the public interest, a government of the time, riding a wave of public anger, made it illegal to distinguish between people on the basis of gender or ethnic origin. In any way whatsoever. Even gender-indicative pronouns were to be phased out. Reaction was swift, hostile and loud (as it was to everything, back then). But governments do not admit mistakes, opposition to the new Act split into factions, and inevitably, given the mood of the time, that opposition provoked a countervailing movement (array of factions) in support of the new Act. The government did not fall; the Act was not repealed.
 
Blurred boundaries. The Act was, perhaps, the “Act of Madness” that some suggested, but it is the clearest marker of the new beginning – it was the idiosyncratically human stroke of luck. Scholars have struggled to explain what happened next. Some suggest that there was already a strong undercurrent of public feeling against exclusion of any kind; others to the launch of the #AllOfUs movement (which was responsive not causative, surely?). [There is even an argument that the Left-Handed Rights campaign, which in its short life achieved the banning of handles and grips moulded for right-handed use, also served to draw attention to so-called “invisible minorities”.]
 
We all agree, though, that the new Act succeeded in blurring a boundary that had become an obstacle to mutual understanding. “You can’t run a fence down the middle of equality,” was a saying of the time.
 
It is scarcely believable now that the not-so-gradual repurposing of the word “populist” – to refer to people in the way that the word “feminist” had referred to a gender-identified subdivision of the people – took some observers by surprise. But the crucial point here is not the speed of the change, but its substance. The old movement, feminism, had expressed so much injury, so much injustice, so much resentment, that on a superficial analysis, a simple change in the law should not have been enough to bring about such a transformation. But it did, and the reason for that was, crudely, we were all newly able to share the pain. There is a technological explanation for this, of course, and we'll get to that. But first, let us further explore the human aspects. They were important too.
 
Humanity found. This was a long-overdue time of boundaries crossed and broken down; it was a time when we began to discover how to find peace before conflict; how to share ourselves in ways that had not been possible when we had defined ourselves by difference. It was a time, we can now say, when we began to look for similarity and found empathy. We were beginning, in that time, to reach out to each other in ways that seem commonplace now but were unheard-of then. “We were all feminists then; we are all populists now,” was a transitional slogan. It was a brave time.
 
Yes, the first populists – in the new sense – belonged to the same subdivision of people as had populated the old feminist movement. But the Act, mad as it might have been, stroke of unintended luck, had opened us up to each other. We embraced this opportunity to be together. The People’s Institute increased its membership by a third in a month; the popular podcast and radio programme People’s Hour reported a doubling of its audience in a single audit period. So much hurt – suddenly shared. A dam broken.
 
Dressed for tech. So far, so idealistic. It would be good to believe that human nature achieved harmony on its own. But this is where technology finally proved its worth. First, the Summer Heatwaves of the early 2020s saw the launch of [gender-neutral] Cool Clothing – a brand name, but it neatly summarises a durable fashion; whatever the influences from other cultures might or might not have been, whatever the PR and marketing that convinced us, we all began to wear “Summer dresses” back then, and we still do. Intelligent dresses. It is, in both senses, Cool to do so.
 
Then, using a combination of biotech and quantum-generated AI, drawing on lessons learned during those early abortive attempts to evolve sentient cars, a small start-up company based in an industrial park on the edge of Peterborough, then unknown, without venture-capital financing, launched its initial range of Mood Fabric. Initial response was cautious – mood disclosure via clothing made from the fabric was involuntary – but then, shortly afterwards, came the company’s first range of defensive clothing. And the rest, as the saying goes, is history. Almost overnight, gender-related interpersonal violence became a thing of the past. After all, what would-be attacker could get past a defensive release of pheromones and relaxants? All violence began to decrease, mental health to improve, as intelligent clothing hit the mainstream and our emotional states became visible.
 
When the UK’s Ministry of Defence placed a bulk order for uniforms woven out of Peace Fabric, the world did change overnight. We can signal our own and respond to each other’s moods and desires: we can reject and disarm violence; we can extend warmth and understanding in bulk to whole regiments of would-be enemies; above all, we can negotiate (an archaic word, but still useful) our interactions and relationships on the basis of mutual understanding. To wear clothing that doesn’t signal our feelings is not illegal, because it doesn’t need to be: given what technology can do for us now, it would be absurd not to wear our hearts on our sleeves.
 
As a diplomat was heard to say, in the brief interval between the Five-Minute War and the Three-Day International Love-In And Peace Conference, “The only real change is that we’re all on the same side.” But what a difference that is, and all because technology finally helped us to be the people that we needed to be.
 
*This sentence a fragment of a poem that I can’t find right now, in my clumsy translation from the original German. A poem by Rainer Maria Rilke, I think.

It’s Wednesday morning in Falmouth, and there’s bright sunshine coming straight in through the windows, almost horizontal this early. The sun’s just up and I’ve closed the blinds beside me: hard to see the screen in this much light. There’s probably a paradox in that, but I’m not in the mood. Today is my free morning this week, until later, and I’ll make a start on this before the day begins.
 
I can hear seagulls. There’s a cruise ship in, smaller than they usually are, reversed in against the dock. Smoke – steam? – rising from its funnel. I think later I might do some research on the correct (not exactly technical) terms I really should know already, if I’m going to start the day’s writing with a description of a short white cruise liner tied up in Falmouth and blowing off steam. Maybe it’s about to leave. It was here yesterday and they don’t stay long. Looming up over Events Square like a sudden apartment block.
 
Steam. The seagulls are still arguing and I’m sitting here looking out at an innocuous white cruise ship with a mental image of men shovelling coal into furnaces. I think maybe I should cut down on the film-watching. It’s a bright morning. Sun glittering on water. There’s a whole world outside. On that ship, people are waking up, and maybe a few of them are rolling aside the cannons and peering out of the gun-ports – sorry, looking out of their windows – portholes, I can say portholes, I think – at the sunlit townscape going up the hill I front of them.
 
Swag. Maybe somebody’s sitting over toast and tea and writing a description of the morning view of the town into a journal. Maybe there’ll be photographs in which I’m a tiny undetectable micro-pixel in a window-shaped blur. Or maybe they’re all huddled round their devices picking up the latest developments in the Trump presidency. Smaller cruise ships tend to be marketed as exclusive, high-end, whatever, blah-blah, pay more, get more, fewer passengers, et cetera, so I think it’s a safe bet they’ll all have state-of-the-art technology. Maybe they’re all huddled round preparing to meddle in the US mid-term elections.
 
Would they be immune from prosecution, if they did their meddling while in international waters? Wow – all this going on and I haven’t even had breakfast. Imagine the Bursar – Purser, whatever (I see a uniformed man in a small cabin tapping out a Morse Code message about an iceberg) – idly reading a few of the postcards before bundling them all into a sack marked ‘Swag’ and hauling them off to the Post Office.
 
“Dear children and grandchildren. Wish you were here. Grandad and I have had a lovely morning in Falmouth sewing doubt in the minds of voters in New Hampshire. I’ve marked a cross on the picture to show you where William Essex is writing his blog post. You know what to do. Love, Granny.”
 
Stumble. Ooh, that’s scary. Even considering that I’m making it up as I go along, spontaneously, never knowing what the next sentence will bring*, et cetera, that’s scary. Brings back a sudden memory of being read Treasure Island as a child, at night (Robert Louis Stevenson, long time ago). Didn’t the whole thing start with the tapping of a stick, heard late at night? And a black mark on a paper? Excuse me if I don’t look that one up (fact-check it, as we say these days); I may have confused more than one bedtime story, but I like the memory as it is.
 
Let’s all think happy cruise ships. Nice cruise ship. Happy passengers. Innocuous blog post. Blog post about seagulls and sunshine and NOT about stumbling across a massive international conspiracy to subvert democracy. [Anybody here from Facebook: do NOT take this blog post seriously. It is supposed to be FUNNY, which is like fake news but OKAY. No, it is NOT fake news. Nice Facebook. I like Facebook.]
 
Even the seagulls have gone quiet … maybe too quiet?
 
*I don’t always write that way, if you’re wondering, hardly ever in fact, but this post seemed to know where it wanted to go. Remember Microsoft’s early tagline, “Where do you want to go today?” Still looking for an answer.

There was once a market, gaudy and bright and self-consciously strange. It was away from the main trade routes, but not hard to find again if you had developed a taste for the merchandise it offered. This was a market that specialised in fantasy fiction. Most of the stallholders were young, and most of them were American, and most of them had written and made (ordered to have printed) the books they had to sell. These were authors, well versed in the myths of their culture, perhaps also jaded with the realities, come now to the market to sell their own myths.
 
Some of the market stalls were located inside a walled garden, and some were scattered around the open country outside those walls. All were brightly painted, and all were piled high with brightly coloured paperbacks*. Even from a distance, from the covers of these paperbacks, the casual visitor could see immediately that this was a place to find tales of young heroes, tall and thin, dressed in long jackets or cloaks, sometimes hooded, always armed with a sword or a staff. There would be horses and dragons, and always a high chance of finding magic.
 
The roads travelled. But would the myth-making be done well? That was the question. The casual visitor stopped at the fork in the road where the market began. Behind him were the familiar trade routes, paved with gold and good intentions, and back even further into his past were the big, established, ordered book markets, bright with promises and media hype but greying with complacency and self-regard, all of them gated, surrounded indeed by gatekeepers, the hard-to-enter cloisters for the chosen few casting long shadows over the slush-piles and the heaps of stillborn myths. He’d had stalls in those markets, over the years, but he’d watched their magic fade until finally he’d left to save his own magic.
 
The casual visitor, who had never understood why parables should stick to the script, sat down on a gnarled old tree-stump with a scowling face and a whole bunch of runes carved into it, reached into his travel-stained robe, and pulled out his e-reader. Pausing only to reflect on the convenience of a travel-stained robe with hidden pockets, he read a bit more of his current book. He’d pre-ordered this one on the strength of some pages he’d seen online, started reading it, and then there’d been something on Facebook about last-minute editing, and the book had changed in his hand. He had been amused by that semblance of magic. The book had drawn him to this market in search of more like it; now, he needed to read it.
 
But it was time for another paragraph. The casual reader stood up. He fumbled around in his travel-stained robe for the right hidden pocket, then, exasperated that he couldn’t find it, laid his e-reader down on the gnarled old tree stump while he tried to find its hiding place. That gave him an idea. He enjoyed blog posts in which creative people unpacked their bags to reveal the kit they took with them on their creative assignments. Could he write something like that?
 
No elaborately dressed china doll? He reached into his hidden pockets, finding them easily this time, and brought out: an Easter egg (he put it down); a whistle, clogged with sand, with an inscription on the side (ditto); another whistle, this one packed with explosive (you understand that he’s putting these things down on the tree-stump, right?); a baseball (only, it clogs up the sentence if I keep having to make that clear); a shadow without a person attached to it (having said that, he put that shadow straight back where it came from, oh yes); a stick (we’ll call it a stick); a very old coin wrapped in a clean white cloth (a denarius, one of a number sought by both sides of an old conflict); an ancient book, probably a grimoire, damaged and apparently blank, bound in something that certainly looked like leather); a
 
new paragraph, because that one was getting too long; a Martini shaker (but not a stirrer); a set of hooks and a thumper; a Ring (got to be One); a corked bottle (very dark glass); another bottle, clear glass, apparently empty but very, very firmly stoppered; a phaser, set to stun; an iPhone 6; a Samsung J5; a Moleskine journal (blue, A5); several pens; a Lenovo Ideapad 320S; three sheets of folded and crumpled (lined) A4 paper (a draft article arguing that state broadcasters should foster young talent rather than paying top dollar for established names); an assortment of daggers, bracelets, amulets and other silverware; several wooden stakes; a green plastic Spork; a pot of green ink and a quill pen; a blue spotted handkerchief; a green banana in a yellow banana-shaped plastic holder.
 
No, no story in that lot. But good to get it all out. Feeling very much lighter, the casual visitor stepped away from the gnarled old tree stump and the heap of his needful objects. Maybe he should look for that article he’d once read about getting rid of possessions and going through life much lighter? He made a complicated series of movements with his hands and rose three inches off the ground. Levitating with the bearable lightness of having almost nothing left in his pockets, he took the right-hand road and entered the market.
 
Sign and sign again. Immediately, he was surrounded by stallholders. This, he had expected. But what surprised him was, none of them were trying to sell him their books. All of them wanted him to sign up for their email newsletters.
 
“Why?” he asked.
 
“So we can keep you up to date with book launches and special offers.”
 
“But I’m already here and I want to buy – oh, okay.” The casual visitor signed, and signed, and signed, and as he did so, the country around the market silted up with email newsletters, some of which he would take home and read. “I just want to find something to read after my current book,” the casual visitor told an excited young woman who was offering him a ride on her unicorn. “I’m going to review it, and then I want another book. Another well-told story.”
 
“You’ve come to the right place!” she told him, and he waited, but she said nothing more.
 
Live interactions. Soon, he was through the cordon of email-newsletter-writers and into the heart of the market. The stalls here were piled high with books. The casual visitor hesitated. Where to begin? He was surrounded by books. On every cover, the eyes of the hero glowed white (sometimes red, occasionally silver) even against the visual cacophony of the market, and on every cover, the lettering of the title curled around, italicised and magical, reaching out like vines or creepers or in some cases briar roses, to catch the casual visitor’s attention. Or maybe his ankles.
 
There were screens, and there was YouTube, and there were podcasts and live interactions and any amount of social media and marketing, but we’ll gloss over all that because I can’t think of a way to work it into the story**. The casual reader was drawn at first to the brighter stalls, to the carnival atmosphere and the celebrations, to the music and the dancing, and yes, he did watch a lot of the social-media activity, but none of it involved reading and soon he tired. “I just want something good to read,” he said.
 
“How about this?” said a voice. The casual reader had settled on another tree stump – yeah, yeah, gnarled, face, runes, all that – next to a stall towards the back of the market. This was a stall that he hadn’t noticed before, not even as he sat down next to it. There were books, and perhaps over there under a pile of paper was a sign-up form for an email newsletter. But on this stall, there was no pristine vintage Remington typewriter, no coffee cup and saucer artfully arranged, no state-of-the-art software for collating a novel once conceived. There was no glossy surface to this stall.
 
There was paper. Pens and pencils. A laptop so battered that it looked ready to be written into a proverb. And this stallholder had just handed him something and gone back to writing. The casual visitor watched for a while. The stallholder went on writing. The casual visitor looked down. He had been given an opening chapter. He began to read. In no time at all he looked up again. “Is there-?” he began. The stallholder, clearly not wanting to be interrupted, handed him the next chapter.
 
Ah, here's the tinderbox. This time, when he had finished, the casual visitor stood up. Quietly, he went to the front of the stall. Cross-checking between the books on offer and the chapters he had just read, he piled up, first, a copy of the book he had just begun, and then the rest of the series as far as it went. Reaching into his most hidden pocket, he pulled out a wallet containing every means of payment so far invented. He was about to interrupt the stallholder, who was still writing, when he felt a touch on his arm.
 
Behind him stood all the other stallholders. “Shhh!” said one. “The final volume isn’t finished yet. Please don’t interrupt the writer. We all want to know what happens in the end.”
 
The casual visitor emptied all his gold coins onto the stall, took his books, and rose into the air. Silently.
 
*Yes, I know – they’d be selling ebooks as well. Don’t be difficult.
**Look, if you absolutely insist, we could say that the whole market is virtual and all the books are ebooks – but a travelling band of faeries cast a glamour that made it seem … I hesitate to say real. Gimme a break, okay? I started with “There was once a market.” And this happened***.
***I wanted to write a piece about young authors (and others) who get so stuck on social-media marketing that it becomes the end rather than a means – and they evolve into, I don’t know, broadcasters or vloggers or whatever. Maybe starting with the past tense was a mistake. There is a market…

Given the unseasonal length of the post above the picture, I’ll keep this one short. In her Investing column on the back page of the FT Money section of the Weekend FT last Saturday (and, because I’ve had enough coffee this morning to be twitchy about such details) Sunday, the editor-in-chief of Money Week*, Merryn Somerset Webb, reviewed a set of age-related statistics on happiness, and then suggested a “summer holiday reading list”. [I’m not sure that the inverted commas are necessary there, but never mind. Too much coffee.]
 
We get happier as we get older. “If you are 50-59 now, odds are you have happy times ahead,” wrote MSW. And then the books: two recent titles on the theme that everything isn’t getting worse, but actually a lot better, and then The Blunders of Our Governments, by Anthony King and Ivor Crewe, which was first published in 2013 (Oneworld). “Huge blunders are perfectly normal for governments. Our current one is not uniquely idiotic – which is something to hang onto if you find your mind wandering too much from beach to Brexit.”
 
Hang on tight. And even if there isn’t space in your suitcase for at least one hardback (one of the books reviewed is too recent to have got past that stage), the article itself is worth reading. Title: Why be fatalistic? Life’s getting so much better. Maybe it’s time to enjoy the real world, too.
 
*Sorry for all this preamble.

When the League of Nations failed to prevent the Second World War, it was replaced by the United Nations. When the European Union failed to secure an unambiguous mandate from the British electorate, it was replaced by an array of euphemisms. There were Agreements, Arrangements, Understandings, Models; only the word “Union” itself was excluded from the eventual Settlement. “Politics is the art of talking a lot and changing nothing,” said one observer, crudely paraphrasing Otto von Bismarck*.
 
At 11pm on Friday, 29th March 2019, the UK formally left the EU. That Summer, a UK political party fought a leadership election over the question of whether or not the UK had actually left. As one (defeated) candidate put it, “We’re still members, even if we’ve torn up our membership card.” The issue perpetuated a rift in British politics: departure had entailed the signing of a new set of treaties (Agreements, etc.), and this was, or wasn’t, a betrayal of the original vote to leave (see the chapter Referendum: Boring in the Apocrypha section of this imaginary history textbook). The status quo hadn’t really shifted; the nation states of Europe hadn’t moved. History continued.
 
Blame the late-stage innovations. But the real historical significance of the so-called “Brexit Era” was not the unresolved split between the broadly equal numbers of “Remainers” and “Brexiteers” in the UK electorate, nor was it exactly the rise of “populism” (however defined; the term itself was dismissed as a “political blunt instrument” by a high-profile broadcaster in early 2019). The key to understanding this period in British history is simply this: it was short. The Brexit Era lasted barely more than a decade, and Brexit itself was the culmination of a change process that began perhaps as early as 2011.
 
Historians disagree as to the trigger event for the Brexit Era, with some pointing to geopolitical change, thus fundamentalism and the rediscovery of religion, and others to cultural changes that were themselves triggered by globalisation. A few still refer back to the “first transition event” in value exchange**, but most now argue for a subliminal – barely visible but rapid – change in social/interpersonal attitudes that they track back to one of a small number of late-stage innovations in retail technology. This was also the era of communication via “smart” devices; technologists were still talking about “artificial intelligence”; they had not yet addressed the more pressing issue of “artificial stupidity”.
 
Venn diagrams, each circle felt as local. Where historians do agree is: this was the decade in which, so to speak, everything changed (or for a few, began to change). Hindsight might give us Brexit as the headline issue, but by then, truly viable communications technology had reached the masses, globalisation had reduced distances, value exchange had ceased to be physical, and such concepts as “the nation state” and “national government” had become anachronistic – as had political systems built on the “static democracy” model of a “nationwide” vote at fixed intervals (of years rather than minutes). “The money hasn’t just run out; it’s dematerialised,” tweeted a popular comedian and political theorist, making a more subtle point than perhaps she realised.
 
Much has been written about the “global localism” enabled by personal communications technology; much has also been written about the speed with which today’s culture of personal identity has been adopted. Our system, based on each individual’s personal grid (or “personal space” in common usage) of intersecting interest groups anchored in physical location, is unprecedented in recent human history. It is also, of course, only viable at today’s global population levels.
 
We’re always arguing about something, aren’t we? It is a tragic irony that global warming, coupled with human nature, has finally given us a semblance of stability. We built the “vectors” whereby the so-called “heatstroke rabies” pandemic achieved its global reach, but it was human nature that stopped our response – stopped us grounding the world’s aircraft, closing shipping lanes and highways, thus stopped us limiting the spread of the disease, and buying time to find – look for, at least – a cure.
 
Why did it matter, whether or not this new plague was a “zombie apocalypse”? Why was so much time wasted on protecting early-stage patients (showing “zombie” symptoms) from those who advocated euthanasia? Why so many reassuring lies and so much argument, when above all we needed to work together? Why spend so much on PR for the status quo, when the world around us was collapsing?
 
It’s too late now. Billions died. A generation has been born since those end-times, and we’re beginning again. The Summers are hot and the Winters warm. As some say, it’s as if we live in the world that dystopian fiction described. There are wasps the size of drones, and packs of feral dogs (and cats). But the scattered tribes of survivors are still in communication with each other, and at a basic level, the cities still function. The weather powers the generators, and the technology – some of it – still works. There is good hunting in the stone canyons, and shelter to be found in the ruins.
 
One day, not too far from now, we will set out across the plains, along the surviving roads, over the bridges and through the tunnels, to meet up with our fellow survivors and teach them to live in compliance with our ways and our beliefs. Then, at last, we will live in harmony.
 
*“Politics is the art of the possible, the attainable – the art of the next best.” Otto von Bismarck. I looked this up online, of course. Above the late German Chancellor’s passport photograph and quote is an ad for FlexiOffices (I’ve added the capitals). Below is a message for me. “None of your friends have liked this quote yet,” I’m told. There’s something endearingly strange about the modern world.
**The period between the implosion of the “global economy” in 2007/8 and the launch of the Bitcoin network in 2009 has been memorably described in one text as “the scraping of the iceberg along the hull” for the old order. Some historians specialise entirely in the language of technology/utility advertising of the time. We were put there frequently, but were we ever “in control”, they ask?

In writing the post above, I noticed that my spellcheck now queries “Remainers” but not “Brexiteers” (or “Brexiters”). I wonder if the Illuminati have turned in favour of Brexit, or perhaps the Trilateral Commission are now working to separate the UK from the EU. There was that book by Jon Ronson, Them (2001), that went into a range of conspiracy theories, and of course we shouldn’t forget Nudge by Richard H Thaler and Cass R Sunstein (2008), which tells us that change can be more effectively achieved by nudging people than by telling them straight-out to change and then getting all officious about it.
 
Makes sense to me. It’s human nature, I suppose, to pick up on the nudge-filled specifics of a situation, whether we’re doing the old-style hunter-gatherer thing, or buying a used car, or negotiating a billion-dollar contract – or indeed deciding whether to eat something that’s way past its sell-by date. Intuition. It’s green. It’s quiet – too quiet. Something just doesn’t smell right. That cliché from fiction about the smile not reaching the eyes. We pick up on all that, but our eyes glaze over at the explicit insincerities of advertising and/or motivational management-speak.
 
Also read Blink by Malcolm Gladwell (2006), and while you’re at it, watch any episode of Columbo (“they” haven’t remade it yet, I’m pretty sure; I mean Columbo with Peter Falk, and preferably an early episode – perhaps you’ll find the episode – maybe there was more than one – where they were all so obviously trying not to laugh). Everything’s spelt out these days, as if we’re being programmed, but that’s not how we work. Intelligence can’t be treated as artificial. [Even, one day, when it is?]
 
[Aside. Does the job “computer programmer” still exist? Sometimes I think that all the computer programmers of old went into management, after having learned nothing/forgotten everything about human behaviour.]
 
Sorry, politics. Not that it was exactly a nudge, but I liked the detail, a day or two back, that the announcement of the latest agreement (sic) on the UK government’s Brexit strategy (sic) was announced just as the cabinet sat down to dinner – so that they were all three courses and coffee away from being able to brief against it. Bet there were chocolates with the coffee. There have been resignations since, I know, and all manner of ructions, but for me, that timing was the detail, the little flick of the ball past the defender (yes, I watched France:Belgium), that indicated real skill.
 
Not that I’m expressing an opinion in favour of any particular individual, you understand, nor any political party, but I like those minutely but irrevocably revealing moments. Let's invent another one, and this time let’s hold the politics: you’re standing on a beach, looking out at a flat-calm sea, and trying to decide whether this is the perfect, or just a very good, opportunity to go swimming. Then, very briefly, about a hundred metres out, just for a split second, the dorsal fin of a shark breaks the surface. Leaving you still watching a flat-calm sea, but pretty clear that you’re not about to go swimming.
 
Okay, we’re off politics. There’s a piece of music I like. I came across it when I watched the first episode of a television programme called Sanctuary; it’s used as the theme tune for the first and second seasons (changed in the third, I think; no idea why). It’s called Symphonie pour un monde etrange, if you’ll pardon my French, and if you click here, you’ll see the credit sequence as well as hear it; I’m only mentioning it because the tail fin, ten seconds in, has just come back into my mind. Curious how the mind works. But this is where that opening sentence above has taken me (a robot would just have added those two B-words to the spellcheck, or subtracted the R-word, and powered down).
 
Symphony for a Strange World, Joel Goldsmith and Neal Acree. The late Joel Goldsmith. Film, television and video-game music. I love the internet at moments like this, and in particular, I’m really quite fond of YouTube. There’s so much music out there that I haven’t heard. So many clips. And all because – excuse me; I’m going to listen to music for a while – I picked up on that funny little detail about the cabinet eating together. Politics does serve a useful purpose, after all. Who knew?

Having been eaten by bears in my previous incarnation, one careless early morning in the Spring thaw, I thought long and hard about my options going forward. Reincarnation – incarnation from that perspective – is only one of the opportunities available in this world that I’ve built. [If you don’t know what I’m talking about, scroll down to the (very recent) post Was that you, walking beside me? and read up from there.]
 
I thought about roles in guardianship, companionship, and just generally hanging around on the outer edge of consciousness making accidents not happen. [How do we survive? Think about it. Life is dangerous even if – especially if, statistically – we stay at home.] I like a world in which there’s more than just a prosaically visible reality, and sometimes that means, er, showing up. Or not showing up, exactly. Being there. Wearing the sheet. Breathing the wind. Occasional thunderbolts as an expression of emotional release.
 
But that’s too easy. Solving problems from inside the problem is always the real challenge; to be a participant observer rather than some kind of ex-machina uncredited assistant. There’s a parallel universe in which I went that way, and yes, I had a lot of fun until I was challenged to try it for myself, but in the world on my screen right now, I chose a quiet, uneventful life inside the walls of a sunlit hill town in what we now call southern France.

​Weren’t you going to say something about Brexit? I was content. Nothing happened. I was never bored, because boredom hadn’t been invented back then, and I lived a life that I accepted as my due (to the extent that I thought about it: like so many of us in those times, I avoided the religious debates while taking a deity for granted). I was married to the second daughter of my patron, and the achievements of that life were two children, girl and boy, both safely married by the time I died, a widow left financially secure, and twelve carved faces high up in the soft stone of the cathedral that my daughter lived to see completed.
 
They’re gone now, those faces, worn away by time and the elements, but there were descendants from that life, and they prosper. Have to tell you, though, that I came away from that deathbed unfulfilled: a habit of caution so often builds to an avoidance of life. I spent time outside thereafter, handling the serendipities of everyday life for a group of artists, and then I began a period of decades in which I shadowed a similar life to the one I had so recently lived: he was one of the artists, but a follower not a leader. You’ll know his works, if you’ve studied the art of the period.
 
Come on, what about Trump? And when that was over, we talked. A completed life, however long and however fulfilled, is only ever part of a greater whole, we agreed. This meant, we told each other, that working together would bring us more quickly to … we both hesitated; he said “enlightenment”; we both smiled. For our own amusement, we conducted our conversations in the library of a not-yet-ancient university, where we were taken to be scholars by those who could see us. Laughter would have been out of place; smiling it had to be. Life, so-called life, is an opportunity to engage as well as to experience, we agreed; its meaning is outside itself.
 
In time, we went back into life as believers, heretics in each other’s eyes, on opposite sides of an argument about the specifics of belief. My town, my beloved walled town to which I had returned, burned around me. We were unaware of our true selves, of course, because true experience requires prior ignorance, and in the end, his was the signature, his the seal, that gave me over to the fire. I waited for him at his end, and after a moment of fear that purged that life's lingering enmity between us, he laughed at last, at the loss of constraint, and I laughed with him. We had found our way to “enlightenment”.
 
What is this post going to do to your brand image as a writer of predictable but sometimes amusing blog posts on Brexit, Trump, gender issues and all the rest? But we had started a new cycle now, twisted around each other like two helices, and we both realised that this could not be an end. We were born again, died, were born again. We hated each other, loved, loved again. In time, the balance between us defined what we were: partners, brothers, twin souls, one. We – I – wrote it all down. The manuscript, rolled tight in a jar in the old way, properly sealed, awaits discovery. It is the seed of another cycle.
 
Okay, that’ll do for today’s post. I did have something insightful to say – promise – about Brexit, or maybe it was Trump, but on the evidence of what I’ve written so far, I’m really not in the mood. Read the opening passages of John Irving’s A Prayer For Owen Meany (1989). Pick up the tone of the narrator’s comments about Reagan and the Contras, and apply that to whatever’s in today’s headlines.

​If the world had been over-run by giant, mutant wasps, I probably wouldn’t be writing this. But it hasn’t, so I am. The art of the arresting opening sentence was taught to me, a long time ago, by a manager – not an editor – at the Financial Times. He read something I’d written – not for the paper – and then spent five minutes sharing his view that “The” was the most boring word in the English language. “Never start anything with “The””, he told me.
 
And I never have. Not for publication, anyway. I worked out for myself that giant, mutant wasps can only be deployed at the start of articles about giant, mutant wasps – there’s such a thing as too arresting – and learned also that if you just let an opening sentence take you where it wants to go, you’ll end up with something far more interesting than if you’d stuck to your first idea. You can always go back and edit, after all. But if the spontaneities aren’t written down as they occur, they’re lost.
 
Reading the wall. “Never take notes,” said a friend of mine, and I ignored that. “Always carry a notebook,” said another, and I try to do that. My notes tend to be phrases, sometimes sentences and very occasionally paragraphs, but when they take the form of things I have to do – I’ve noticed that the things I’ve written down are the things I’m least likely to do. They’re illegible, a lot of the time, and when they aren’t – well, they’re safely on the list, so I can stop worrying about them.
 
Yes, I do possess a waterproof notebook, and yes, I have made a note to put it within reach of the shower. When I find it again. Yes, the best ideas invariably turn up just after I’ve applied a generous helping of shampoo, but one of the disguised gifts of aging is a pre-occupation with mental function – and holding onto a phrase (sentence, paragraph) for the time it takes to reach a flat surface and a writing implement can feel like a real achievement. Yay! I’m still alive. Now, where are my reading glasses?
 
Yes, I know. Technology. Gets in the way, doesn’t it? What? Oh, sorry. Like so many people, you’re younger than me. Or perhaps, less stubbornly set in your ways? But you’re right, of course: technology’s wonderful. If it standardises our responses, well, okay. Idiosyncrasy is a small loss in a mechanistic society concerned only with what it can measure. Imagine Lewis Carroll trying to write his “nonsense poem” Jabberwocky (1872) with auto-correct – there is a spellchecked (and wholly, flatly nonsensical) version online, along with various analyses and explanations. We’re not going to let it just be its rhythmical, portentous self, oh no.
 
What we've lost. I’m of an age to be nostalgic about some of the old ways – although I wouldn’t want actually to use a typewriter again, I like to see all the images of typewriters and typewriter keyboards used online to suggest writing. Because it’s a grown-up activity with a history, perhaps; laptops edge into the category of modern things that advertise themselves by evoking directly what we’ve lost: airline seats in which people are sleeping soundly; new cars cruising along empty country roads; property developments named for the landscape feature that they’ve destroyed. Oh, and smartphones that bring people together.
 
Enough of this gloom. What I meant to say was, I’ve reached the third age: I was covetous of more bandwidth and a faster processor and the lifestyle advertised in connection with the latest silvery gadget; then I was grumpy in a whole range of mildly self-indulgent ways (feel free to boast about the performance of your self-driving car, if you can – ha!); now I think I’m preserving not-yet-ancient skills like handwriting, note-taking – and come to think of it, writing a blog post to express an idea rather than as a vehicle for whatever’s the latest incarnation of SEO.
 
Do we still talk about SEO? I’m finding new ways to be old-fashioned. My local tablet-mending shop has a Commodore 64 in the window – I had one of those; used to play Elite – and next to it a PDA – there was a game on mine that involved lining up coloured blobs. No wonder the birds are angry to have lost that one. Memo to self: when you get wheeled off to a nursing home, take lots of graph paper so you can teach the nurses to play the pre-tech version of Battleships. Or, if their minds are too evolved to grasp that, you can challenge your contemporaries.

This is going to be so difficult. But in the absence of a training course on how to write this blog, or a downloadable book on how to attract “traffic” to this website, or at least a flow chart showing how to pick the exact-right words for a standard-issue blog, I guess I’m going to have to wing it with whatever I can muster by way of creativity and imagination. So here goes.
 
I know. Storytelling. Last week. That thing about reincarnation. I picked a starting point for my Journey – no, I’m okay with that word, even with the capital J – that fell at some time in the early years of The Beaker People, for whom I have a soft spot. An entire civilisation, lasted a thousand years-ish, and all we know about them is that they left some beakers behind. Imagine if all we had of The Victorians was a small collection of chamber pots. Imagine if all we had of The Dinosaurs – lasted millions of years, went everywhere – was a small collection of fossils.
 
No, wait. We’ve gathered at the stone, the children and I, and I’m telling them the story about the sun. It’s early in the day, because storytelling is important, and I’ve started the story by challenging them to look at the horizon and tell me where the sun will rise. They’re just at that age where they leave the hearth to play-hunt in a pack, and there’s laughter because their childish bonding makes me an outsider. But I wait, and presently, one of them tells me correctly that the sun will rise over the long mountain.
 
Does it always rise there? No. [Storytelling starts early: they’ve heard this, and been prompted to make the observation, already.] We stand to welcome the sun, and in return he gives us the warmth back, and we watch his light spread across the land. There is birdsong; we are not alone in welcoming the sun. I ask them what signs there are in what we have seen and heard, what those signs tell us about the day to come, and again, but this time without laughter, they give me their answers. Together, they have felt the sun’s touch and sensed the land’s response.
 
That was different. I’m not finished yet. I want them to come away with the idea – sorry, I’m going to have to follow this story through – that the sun follows the seasons just as they do, so that one way of working out where they are in the cycle of seasons – one of many, for everything is a sign – is to watch where the sun rises on the horizon. When he comes back to the long mountain, as he has now, the cold season is ending. But between now and the greening of the trees, children, we must be cautious hunters: the hibernating predators will wake up soon, and they will be angry with their own hunger.
 
When I say that, in that tone of voice, the children will look at each other, having heard that warning before but not yet believing it, and it is in the nature of small children that those shared looks will spark laughter, and I will release them for another day. They will run off to play-hunt, and watching them, I will think of a flock of birds turning and turning in the sky. Then, because a story is a useful thing, a tool for survival, worth honing, I will sit with the sun for a while, telling him the story as I will tell it next time.
 
A story must be busy to hold the attention, I know, and I will talk to the sun about his home under the edge of the land. About – it occurs to me – his partner. Do sun and sky argue; does sky cry; does sun take the warmth until he feels ashamed and brings it back again? Sun is an old man, I feel; sun and sky have been a long time together. What have the sun and the sky made of us over so many seasons? Do they react to our behaviour? I begin to craft a new story…
 
Finished? Nearly. The woman comes to me. It is not yet child-season, but she is big, and our child responds to my touch on the curve of her belly. The woman bears my mark on her forehead and I bear her mark on mine; the marks will remain until the hot season wanes and it is time for me to choose and be chosen again. I am strong; I have stories; I will remain among the chosen for many seasons yet. But this woman; I want to tell her that I would choose her again. She touches my lips before I can speak: the baby will have come by then, and that is a happiness of its own. We have had our time.
 
Enough! Any more of this, and there’ll be blog-writing gurus hammering on my door and shouting about keywords and search-engine optimisation. Why, they’ll demand, haven’t I turned this into a ten-part training course to get people’s email addresses and sell them things? That’s what absolutely everybody else does, they’ll point out – not seeing the flaw in their argument. And then the brightest among them will offer to sit down with me and thrash out whether mine should be a training course on sunrise-watching or storytelling*, and then we’ll all wander down to the Jacob’s Ladder for a pint and a discussion on the England v. Belgium match.
 
Not a bad ending, actually.
​
*My book Ten Steps to a Bedtime Story is out of print, sorry. That would make a ten-part training course. Maybe I should think about reading it onto YouTube, or something. No, wait. The whole point of bringing it back would be to get your email address and sell you things, so not YouTube. And anyway, the stuff I’ve got to sell goes quite easily at the weekly car-boot sale up at the rugby club. Although maybe I’m missing something here…

​Go back a few thousand years, and you would have found me sitting in the entrance of a communal dwelling, holding a beaker, watching the sun set, telling stories of gods and monsters to the children of the tribe. After an early death – do the guardian-angel thing and walk beside me here – I would have been reincarnated as a peasant, listening to a seriously fired-up preacher telling stories, et cetera, to the entire tribe and thinking: I could do that.
 
But that would have ended badly, in circumstances involving a stake, some bundles of dry wood, and somebody with the woodcraft skills not to have to wait for lighters to be invented. Because I’m a slow learner (in today-speak, a late adopter) I might then have gone into a life of mysticism and wizardry, wearing a long cloak, growing my beard past the itchy stage and dying it greyer with ash from all my ritual-fire ceremonies … wearing a big hat and carrying a big stick and defying the Romans. Some bard would have written a description that survived into a museum collection, and Tolkein would have found it and dreamed up Gandalf.
 
Dry twigs, anybody? But that would have ended, um, yeah. Then maybe I would have applied to join the Medieval Church as a scribe, shaving my bald patch into place in advance of its arrival, going big on piety and the acceptance of whatever alms happened to be on offer on Wild Boar Night at the local hostelry, and doing the words for illuminated manuscripts. Assuming I could have remained fat (regular Wild Boar Nights) and un-psychic and not prone to visions, that might have ended reasonably well. Today, there’s a run-down ancient church somewhere, protected by the National Trust, where tourists gasp as they look through glass at my bones in an ancient stone casket.
 
Having not quite learned my lesson (at what we might as well call soul level) about the link between speaking out and dying badly, I might then have gone into the metal business, melting down base metals to make letters for the new-fangled technology of printing. I might have launched courses in Print Media Marketing For Playwrights, or I might have handled the print side for some flamboyant entrepreneur with a taste for nailing his demands to church doors – or I might have decided that the play’s the thing, and written a few. Today, collectors bid by telephone at hushed auctions of the few remaining original printings of my work. There’s a flaw in a lower-case ‘d’ that is taken to prove authenticity.
 
Watch Only Lovers Left Alive (2013) for an entertaining play (sorry) on the theme of misattribution. After all that, I would have died young after drinking water from the wrong standpipe in Victorian London, and then I would have sat in a trench looking at barbed wire and writing a letter home to express a truth hard-found– a letter never sent. They didn’t all survive (or not survive) to be remembered. Kipling, among so many others, lost a son. A generation represented in tragedy by poetry. Wilfred Owen.
 
Animals in captivity. Born once more into the second half of another century of war, I would have absorbed lessons about stasis, inertia, peace in the form of war never quite declared and only fought by proxy. A form of peace represented in a triangulation of prose, at this end of Europe, between, say, Iris Murdoch, Samuel Beckett, Alistair MacLean and maybe Margaret Drabble (discuss). There’s a poem I read once, in a magazine, and have never found again. It might have been called Television War and it might have begun “We died for you at Hue, flamed to death in Sinai sand...” Maybe it's well known. Wish I could find it again.
 
I would have watched the beginnings of what we now call new technology and the dissolution of the great-power balance. I might have shaken my head to see once again the rising of fundamentalism…
 
And now here we are. Now this. All those years and all those emotions and all those passionate beliefs, all that pain and love and hunger and fulfilment, and the sun is about to break through the clouds on a bright grey morning in the south-west corner of the island where I – I and my predecessors, if we’re all so madly rational now that we’re uncomfortable with that riff on reincarnation – lived it all. What now?
 
Spain beat Iran. Last night I sat down in front of the television and took some notes. Here is the wisdom of our time, as gathered in a quick surf through Freeview.
 
TripAdvisor is as easy as dates, deals, done … Nivea Men gives me protection from dry skin … Lending Stream streams loans … Giffgaff is the mobile network run by me … Pampers is grateful to midwives … I could get ready to unleash Summer by making a Malibu-based cocktail … I could find ten grams of protein in one delicious Nature Valley bar … the Evans family now shops at Aldi.
 
Not forgetting the football, of course. Any nation whose fans can sustain that much noise through a match can’t be all bad. We should drop the stage-managed handshakes and play more ballgames. Elsewhere on television, two men were arguing with each other over something one of them had said to somebody else’s girlfriend; young men in swimming gear were picking partners from a group of young women in bikinis; Ed Harris was in deep water (The Abyss, 1989); the NCIS team was losing a case to the FBI; there was a trailer for Grimm, which seems to be a show about young people who look briefly like monsters when they’re taken by surprise.
 
Nail that lot to the door of a church and hope for a reaction.
 
Oh, take me back.

​Here we go again. I must make sure I write this blog post. I must make sure it’s the right blog post. A phrase came out of the radio this morning. “We must make sure we get the right result.” Oh really? Any ideas on how we might get the right result? No?
 
No. Turns out somebody’s done some research: children who take smartphones into the classroom are more likely to be distracted from learning than children who don’t. Leaving aside the odd fact that we need research to tell us this – as if just knowing something isn’t good enough any more – the question arises: what do we do about it?
 
Hello, Mr Chips. We talk about it. The phrase “We must make sure” sends actually doing anything right to the back of the class. “We” includes everybody who thinks children are at school to learn, plus everybody who thinks children have a right to hold onto their smartphones, plus everybody else except convicted paedophiles and authority figures, whose motives are always regarded as suspect. As for “must”, the active verb somehow attaches to the “We” but not to the person speaking.
 
And “make sure” mandates a long studio discussion or series of meetings. “Make sure” articulates a belief in collective decision-making that somehow inhibits individual initiatives. We all have to agree first, ha ha. Do not confiscate children’s smartphones until we’ve had a discussion; do not stop discussing until we’re all in agreement. Ha ha. I went back to the radio after an hour and they were still talking about it. Very realistic. They were also talking about a UK-government scheme for subsidised nursery care: the government is trumpeting its success; the nurseries are appealing for “donations” from parents because they can’t get enough official money to stay in business.
 
Hi, Coach Carter. Also very realistic. But it's the willingness to learn, how that is sparked, that really matters, right? Not the technology. About the only contemporary depiction of a classroom in which the children – young adults; not sure how old they are – seem to be consenting to learn is the one in Twilight (2008), in which Edward does seem to have retained some knowledge after all those years of looking at slides under microscopes. And maybe the one in The Blind Side (2009), and…
 
…so that’s my argument undermined. I don’t know, maybe there’s some wisdom in this tendency to discuss before/rather than acting. Maybe we should all just remain totally still, resisting any change to the status quo while talking up the action we're not taking. Something happened about Brexit last night, a vote I think, and then Trump went and signed something, and that kept the news media busy while the rest of us got on with watching the football. Iran was playing Spain, I know I mentioned this above, but the sight of a lot of people jumping up and down and shouting, waving Iranian flags, blowing plastic trumpets, their faces painted in Iran’s colours …
 
Oh, yeah, Freedom Writers. I don’t watch football, except to the extent that I do seem to be watching it now, but the sight of that crowd last night (I guess it’s obvious that I’m writing this on Thursday) went a long way towards normalising relations between Iran and my living room – using “my living room” in the sense that political commentators use “Downing Street” to refer to the British government. Today, “my living room” means me. I felt for those Iranians. If I’m ever afflicted by megalomania in my later years, I hope I remember to send a football team rather than call for sanctions.

Watching that third-generation hereditary leader shake hands with that democratically elected president the other day, I thought: gimme a break. Am I really going to write about this pantomime? Across the USA, there are young people writing narrative fiction, and most of it’s fantasy. They tweet, demonstrate, organise and vote, yes, and they’re against guns, yes, but* their enduring contribution to the culture is a body of work that features dragons, monsters and threatened worlds.
 
Go to Facebook, and you can find groups discussing: whether anti-heroes are a good thing; whether characters can express/embody real-world ideas; whether the “rules” of magic can be bent. Oh, and whether this cover is more eye-catching than that cover. Technology enables the production of printed books as readily as it enables blogging, vlogging, tweeting and fake news – and these young people are choosing to write novels – not screenplays – that (a) take us back into myth, and (b) can be bought in old-fashioned print form. Technology has given individuals the ability to bring back the past by going directly to print, but without collecting however many hundred rejection slips first.
 
Gatekeepers. These youngsters are putting out their own stories – putting them out all the way from writing to publishing without anybody blocking their way. If you think that means there has been a wholesale democratisation of storytelling – yes, but it’s a re-democratisation. Yes, I remember the term “slush pile”, and yes, I remember the vast intermediation of book publishing in, say, the eighties – agents, commissioning editors, publishing conglomerates, SAEs, et cetera – but this takes us back over the hump of all that to a time when published stories were either good or they weren’t – authors** managed to entertain, and thus to develop a following, or they didn’t. An idealised, imaginary golden age, perhaps, but I do like that colour for the scales on my dragon.
 
There’s a whole blog post to be written about the collective loss of authority of authority figures everywhere, but the figure I most like to ignore is the one whose response to any new idea – or set of sample chapters – is in the range from “You don’t fit my preconceived notion of a marketable author” to “It won’t work because it doesn’t resemble something that worked last week.” By way of “I’m too complacent in my gatekeeper role to feel my lack of a creative imagination or even empathy.”
 
If the gate’s open, I’ll open it for you. Not that I’m bitter’n’twisted or anything, but even after all these years, I remember the name of the agent who returned something to me (that was subsequently published without her help) with the covering note: “This has been on my desk for several weeks and I haven’t picked it up so I’m returning it to you.”
 
Well, gee, thanks. It sold quite well in the end, actually. And perhaps more significantly for the ongoing collapse of western civilisation, I remember the agent who came back to me with this response to another project (paraphrasing): “It was very good but it didn’t fit with the rest of my list.” Never mind the quality; it has to fit in with everything else. I’ll represent any book you like, so long as it’s this book again***.
 
I wonder sometimes about the conformity of opinion – but that’s another blog post. I realise that some of this young American fantasy fiction won’t conform to, say, F R Leavis’s idea of literature (as expounded in, say, The Great Tradition of 1948 – I got that from Wikipedia), but that isn’t the point.
 
Your turn. They’re getting their shot. That’s the point. Many of these young Americans (other nationalities and age groups are also available) won’t make it as authors in the long term, but that’s just natural selection. They deserve their shot and they’re getting it. They deserve a measure of respect, too. I can complain about technology – quite enjoy complaining about technology, actually – but I will say this for it: if you want a shot at being creative – I’m talking here about novel-writing, but this also applies to just about anything else – today’s technology gives you both the tools and access to the audience. If you have the stamina and the nerve to take the chance.
 
Nice cat. Yes, thank you. Very amusing. Now excuse me – I have to go and photograph my lunch for Instagram.
 
*I wonder whether that’s a “but” or an “and”.
**Charles Dickens, for example.
***The appearance of agents marks the point at which an industry goes beyond human scale. Discuss.

What if these aren’t the end times? What if these are the few transitional decades between, say, the end of the Cold War and the New World Order triggered by final mastery/rejection of all this new technology we’ve over-accepted lately? We’re made stupid by machines; are we still capable of recognising that?
 
Enough of the old-guy talk. The chicken came first, stands to reason, just as our inability to stretch our minds around grammar came before Grammarly. Which is a good thing; it’s a “cloud-based English-language writing-enhancement platform,” and we all need one of those in our lives. I still refer occasionally to my bookshelf-based copy of Hart’s Rules, which have been going – Horace Hart’s rules have – since 1893; look for the New Hart’s Rules among Oxford University Press’s various guides. Or log into Grammarly and follow the prompts.
 
Yes – end, what end? As the Art Editor of a magazine said to me once, as I rushed into the Studio, in the grip of some emergency and laden with galley proofs, b/w pics and layout sheets (never a Pritt Stick around when you need one): “Relax. After a few years, even crises aren’t crises.” Good point. We have the technology to express our opinion, even to panic, but not to show us the long view. Everything’s big and now and newsworthy (sic).
 
I don’t know, I don’t think I can sustain the level of hysteria required for communication these days. A friend signed a petition to “demand” more investment in public transport in the UK. She lives in Hungary, and has posted pictures of bus stations there, so I suppose her interest in the buses of another country, somewhere she hardly ever travels by public transport, is at least discernible – but “demand”? One of the tiny cracks in tech-enabled civilisation is the lack of opportunities just to “ask”.
 
We’re all adversarial now. No, answers aren’t readily available either, but that’s a “something’s wrong” to set against the lingering idealism of tech-enabled communication. To demand isn’t to offer (force, even) an opening for dialogue. If we’re demanding because asking doesn’t work, we’re moving away from the thing that’s wrong, and away from addressing the failure of communication. Maybe the apocalypse will hit, and we’ll all be too busy shouting at each other to notice. Shouting about social media’s ability to bring us together, perhaps.
 
We are on apocalypse-watch, aren’t we? To drag in the obligatory cultural references – here come the spoilers – on the one hand, we have Dr Ian Malcolm, played by Jeff Goldblum, telling the US Congress (I think it was Congress?) in Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (2018) that we’ve unleashed forces that we can’t control – meddled with nature, and so on. By the end of the film, the question isn’t what the T Rex makes of the lion from the zoo; it’s what the dinosaurs are going to make of Caesar and his army from Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011). They’re all loose in the same imagined neighbourhood, I think?
 
And let’s not forget the zombies from World War Z (2013), who will no doubt be keen to join the party. “We’re all doomed” is the stronger hand, I think. On the other hand, well, I was thinking about my tendency to overplay whatever it is that the storytelling requirements of the collective imagination tell us about our instinctive fears – about what we’re tantalisingly afraid might actually (although not quite literally) happen – when onto the car’s music system came Brian Eno’s Just Another Day, from the album, if that’s still the word, Another Day on Earth (2005). “We’ll say, that was just another day on earth…”
 
We’ll put it all behind us. That sums up an attitude that isn’t prevalent these days. Our inconvenient truth (ha! Easter egg!) is not that things might be going wrong, but that they might not matter very much. The forecasts are all doom-laden and dire, the social-media activity hysterical, but the passengers get to their destinations, the presidents shake hands, the forecasts for wholesale post-referendum economic collapse – yeah, right. And does it strike you that there’s always someone else to blame?
 
Mind you, enjoyed the preoccupation with dysfunctional family relationships, and even smiled at the solution proposed by the Father Figure/baddie, in Avengers: Infinity War (2018). Half of us have to die, for us all to be saved? Uh huh. I would drone on about global warming at this point, even “demand” that somebody sorts it out. But I suspect that somehow, the real disasters slide by us while we’re arguing about them. Easier to tweet about what we (sic) must (sic) do, than to do it. I’m not suggesting this, but global warming does begin to look worryingly like a tool we’ve devised at some instinctive level for handling over-population.
 
If so, there might be a short cut. Wasn’t there a thing recently about flatulent cows contributing to global warming? Junk food, anyone?

If animals could think, and perhaps they can, they would pity us. We can’t fly like birds, so we have no knowledge of the 100% of the world that is covered by air. We can’t swim like dolphins can swim*, so we have no knowledge of the 70% of the earth that is covered by water. We don’t have whatever it is that dogs have, so we can’t enjoy, say, walking along a country lane with the intensity that a small, furry, not notably intelligent four-legged animal can bring to the task. We can’t see what cats see.
 
We’ve used our large brains to set ourselves apart from nature. We’ve codified our basic drives into mythologies and moralities; we’ve suppressed, denied or camouflaged our animal instincts; we’ve set ourselves apart not just from nature but also from our own natures. Asked what they regret, the dying don’t proverbially regret not getting more large-brain activity. It’s not more time in the office that they wish they’d spent. It’s more time with their partner, family and friends; more time at home; more time having sex.
 
Home range. In the Star Wars galaxy and others like it, there are bars, typically with live music, where you can find fast spaceships, ace pilots, drinks with smoke coming off the top, and let’s not forget the spectacularly varied clientele. Sometimes, in those bars, you see a customer wearing breathing equipment, maybe even a space-suit. They’re breaking their journey, let’s assume, in a hostile environment. We’re a bit like that on our own planet. We have no idea what’s going on around us. I noticed the female blackbird the other day, beak full of worms, waiting for me to go back inside before delivering lunch to her family.
 
This isn’t a journey. This is home. In my “home range”, there’s a multiplicity of intersecting worlds, some of them human. Out back, the robin is defending his territory against all comers – other robins, anyway. I wonder if he has any reciprocal sense that I regard my garden as my territory. Out front, a bench is being painted and garden furniture arranged in a clearly demarcated territory. I remember looking up at a hawk once, a big one, and thinking: he sees me, but he dismisses me as prey because I’m too big to lift. And then I thought: he doesn’t dismiss me because I’m human and somehow exempt.
 
Wouldn’t happen to a human being. We’re part of this. But we’re not. I remember in the film The Fly (1986, the David Cronenberg remake), Jeff Goldblum refers to “insect politics”. That’s a real thing, in a sense. Every now and then, I get caught by a television programme called The Secret Life of the Zoo, in which young zookeepers discuss the personalities, interactions and sexual activities of captive animals. The big question, every time I tune in, seems to be whether or not the resident male is going to mate with any of the females now being added to his tank, cage or enclosure. “How very different from the home life of our own dear Queen,” as a lady-in-Waiting to Queen Victoria said after seeing a performance of Anthony and Cleopatra. How very different from my – never mind.
 
In our dystopias, we do harm to the world. If they’re made in America, the human spirit triumphs. World disintegrates, popular virtues prevail, man kisses woman, credits roll. But our core mythologies – right back to, for example, the Garden of Eden – are about living on equal terms with animals – sorry, other animals – and indeed plants. Knowledge is the fruit of a tree. From Genesis to Snow White and beyond, apples are dangerous. I can go down to the beach and look out over a sea that is teeming with carrier bags and tiny pieces of plastic, and not see any of them. Sorry, I meant to say “teeming with fish”, but I suppose we have at least made the ocean in our own image.
 
Atlantis. We’re not really here, are we? We haven’t established ourselves. And we know, deep down, what’s going to happen. The dinosaurs lasted for 170 million years. We’ve been around for about five minutes. Our founding mythologies are about living with nature, but so many of the stories we tell ourselves these days – from The Day After Tomorrow (2004), say, to World War Z (2013) via, oh, Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) and maybe The Road (2009) – are about near-extinction. So’s most of the broadcast news, really; the same weighing-up of the prospects for catastrophe.
 
Curious to think that one day, the European Union might attain the mythical status of Atlantis. Was there really such a civilisation? But if you consider that wood, paper, digital storage, metal all decay over time, the real puzzle will be: who were these weirdos? There was once “a widely scattered archaeological culture of prehistoric western and Central Europe, starting in the late Neolithic or Chalcolithic and running into the early Bronze Age” (Wikipedia) that left behind absolutely nothing except a collection of beakers – they’re known to us as The Beaker People.
 
Given the durability (not) of all our achievements, we’re going to enter the archaeological record as The Plastic Bag People, aren’t we?
 
*Always had a soft spot for David Bowie’s “Heroes”.​

Walked into my local bank branch the other today. A cheque* had arrived, and I needed to pay it into my account. State-of-the-art bank branch. Open space. The counter is now an island down on the right-hand side, past the young woman (usually a woman) standing in front of the ATMs where she can do your banking for you**. On the left, there’s a children’s play area, empty, then a set of relatively easy chairs round a low table, empty, and down at the end the little glass offices where people are taken to be sold things. Usually empty.
 
The brief to the designer of this space probably talked about being “accessible” and “inclusive” and perhaps even “friendly”. The word “community” probably appeared more than once, and possibly the phrase “heart of the community”. On screens on the walls, the bank’s TV ad runs constantly, so you’re being smiled at while you wait (it’s not the one with the horses). There are mirrors in lifts because apparently you panic less if you’re stuck in a box where you can see yourself. Similar principle with the smiling TV screens, I guess.
 
Just saying. But there’s never anybody in the branch except the queue at lunchtimes and other peak-convenient times. You stand in the queue and think about what this space could be, if it was used as it’s designed to look as though it’s being used. Make it available to mother-and-toddler groups? Let a lunchtime book group meet here, maybe? Waterstone’s in Truro used to have (probably still has) story-time in the children’s department – a member of staff sitting cross-legged on the floor and reading, say, Julia Donaldson’s The Gruffalo (1999, Macmillan) to toddlers and their parents (usually mothers).
 
And no, there was no actual need to buy the book afterwards, although perhaps toddler-pressure might have been applied. Once, many years ago, I was given lunch by the manager of Harrods Bank***. Lunch in the store. We talked about the yield on floor space given over to banking, and the yield on floor space given over to selling teddy bears. I suppose if my local bank branch wanted to diversify into the heart of the community, letting the toddlers bring their teddy bears, and bringing in some sample toys from the store across the road, might be a start.
 
Put out a coffee machine. Not so long ago, in one of my own photographs here, I spotted my copy of Paco Underhill’s Why We Buy (1999, Orion Business). About making people feel comfortable enough to buy in stores and retail spaces. Must read it again – where was I? Oh yes. Got to the counter. Had the usual Q&A about electronic payments being more efficient than cheques. Then the usual Q&A about the savings account they could offer me. Paid in my cheque. Walked away from the island thinking about all the conversations – like the one with the doctor about healthy eating and exercise – that are delivered with no sense that, y’know, might have heard it all before.
 
No, ma’am, it has never occurred to me that electronic banking might be more efficient than carrying this cheque around. I could sit in my armchair and never get any exercise at all. Emerged into the sunshine, thought briefly about the levels of authorisation that branch would need to open up its space to the community, and got on with my life. Some large organisations just congeal into irrelevance, don’t they? Went home, pruned my roses in the manner suggested by the man in St Agnes, made tea. If you go to St Agnes, don’t miss the roses in Chegwyn Gardens. Really don't.
 
If you want to know, just ask me. Then, first thing this morning, an email arrived. From the bank. Subject line: We welcome your feedback. Heading on the content: We value your opinion. Okay. “Dear William Essex,” it begins. Almost like it’s programmed to use Fname, Lname, like a Mailchimp send-out. You should understand that I’ve had this account since I was fourteen. I don’t use it much, but the branch is handy for the occasional cheques that still arrive. [If you’re here from Facebook: irony; humour. Yes, I am aware of online/electronic banking.]
 
“We’re dedicated to making our customer experience the best it can be,” said this automated missive from the bank that I’ve known since I first said “Hello Uncle Bedford” to the branch manager who had come to our house to discuss some business thing with my father. A long time ago. Mr Bedford. I was a lot younger than fourteen when he and I were first introduced. A bit hazy on family and other relationships. Uncle Bedford.
 
The thing from Mailchimp – sorry, the bank – refers to “our” customer experience, but I’m pretty sure they mean “your” – in the sense, mine (no slip there, Professor Freud). “We will combine your feedback with our customer records to better understand how to improve the service we provide.”
 
It’s got these darling little ATMs. Jolly good. They’ve got people coming into their branches, joining the peak-time queues, standing idle for perhaps ten minutes on their turf, and what they want to do is combine my post-visit tick-boxes with my past transactional history to work out how to improve – what? Will there be an “other” box where I can put “hire more staff to reduce queues” or even “open up your spaces to mother-and-toddler groups”? These questionnaires are so often a distancing mechanism, aren’t they? Sitting behind the scenes adding up responses to the questions you’ve chosen to ask is safe by comparison with talking to unpredictable customers.
 
It’s not even that, actually. “Based on your recent experience in branch, how likely are you to recommend [bank name redacted] to a friend or family member?” What? Leave out “in branch”, which is reminiscent of “in country”, which is a term I associate with the Vietnam War. [In Country. Film 1989.] Just what kinds of conversation do you think I have with friends and family? “Oh, by the way, I really recommend this out-of-the-way little bank branch I’ve found.” Those sentences have to have a second half. If it’s a café, it’s the coffee, or the tapas, or … and if it’s a bank branch, it’s the, er, emptiness, maybe?
 
“Please give your answer on a scale where ‘0’ means ‘not at all likely’ and ‘10’ means ‘extremely likely’.” Janice Nicholls, where are you now? Anybody here remember the TV show Juke Box Jury? Janice Nicholls’ catchphrase was, “I’ll give it five.” So’s mine, when I bother to complete these things.
 
*Younger readers. Like an online payment, but printed on paper. You have to take it into a bank to activate it.
**And you can both pretend that this is somehow different from walking up to the little island and asking the other woman (usually a woman) to do your banking for you. I think I’m supposed to take the hint and do this for myself in future, but they’re pleasant young people.
***I ate a lot of lunch in that job.

Way back a long time ago, back in the mid-nineteen-eighties, I had a job that took me on frequent trips downriver to look at residential property developments. I would board the riverboat near Parliament, along with my regular band of specialist-property and sometimes-writes-about-property and please-come-to-make-up-the-numbers journalists, PRs and assorted hangers-on (including the day’s property developers), and we would chug down the Thames towards what would eventually become Canary Wharf (in today’s sense), drinking champagne as we went.
 
There would be canapes, and as the finale, a lunch. A gift, usually a paperweight but sometimes a pen, with the name of the day’s development printed (indelibly) on the side, and a glossy press pack bulging with press releases that could be copied out and pictures that could be used to illustrate articles. When we got to the day’s show flat, we would troop around the rooms and out onto the balcony, taking it in turns to ask the regular questions about projected rental income, outgoings, membership fees for the leisure club downstairs, travel connections to airports and the City.
 
Technicolour yawn. Then we would go and have lunch. After lunch, the PRs managing the trip would make very sure that we had hold of our press packs before sending us away to wherever we felt it safest to go – straight home, or back for a comatose half-hour at the office. Return riverboat trips tended to be quiet, if they happened at all – my memories are vague, oddly enough. There were cars, taxis, bright lights…
 
This was in the days before everything fell apart for that kind of – what shall we call it? – blatant capitalism? Unashamed capitalism? Journalism? The miners’ strike (1984-1985) was on the news; the Murdoch Group was about to move production to Wapping (1986), and since we’re talking about the river, the Marchioness disaster (1989) hadn’t happened yet. Mrs Thatcher was in the ascendant. There were yuppies, and many of them had big swinging – but I never liked that one. How language, and popular jargon in particular, just disappears.
 
Shock horror pose. I remember that the imaginary owners of all those show flats invariably had the same taste in furniture and interior design. They all possessed bowls of lemons in the kitchen and tonic in the fridge, but never any gin. They all read freebie property magazines that they kept stacked neatly on their coffee tables. None of them owned slippers, but they were all content to step out of bed onto cold marble floors. They owned coffee cups and saucers, sometimes shiny coffee machines, but no coffee.
 
Occasionally, back then, I would walk home past Harvey Nichols (a long way past Harvey Nichols), and wonder what had just happened to make the mannequins stand like that. What narrative drama had been passing through the window dresser’s mind as she – he – worked them into place? And occasionally, the invitation would be to fly out and view a property development on the Marbella coast. This would be a slightly different regular group of journalists – I was in the intersecting bit of the Venn Diagram – and the questions would be asked round the pool, not on the balcony. The drinks would carry umbrellas.
 
Tour zone. There would often be a titled European person to host the whole thing, and we would drive from the airport past half-completed, failed property developments just like the one we had come to see. Without comment; that would have been rude. There was always a golf course, and always this amazing little local restaurant where we’re going tonight. I remember one trip, the woman from [name of newspaper redacted] got up half-way through the opening drinks and left with the pianist. She did phone the PR to say that she was okay, but the rest of us didn’t see her again until the trip back to the airport.
 
Yes, she took home a copy of the press pack. And I remember the older photojournalist, along for the ride, who turned to me once, in a pointless little space of benches and tables and trellises between one block of a development and another, somewhere on the coast south of Marbella, and said to me, “This is just like Saigon before the fall.” I think he might have been old enough to know, but … sometimes wondering is better than knowing. It’s a bit too easy to pick up on that “before the fall” as a segue into whatever I’m going to say next, but never mind.
 
Reality. That was a world of press packs and printed photographs and hangovers and galley proofs and Tippex and typewriters and ribbons and trips to the printers to okay the bromides, and it’s all gone down into the bottle with the genie: keep on moving the cursor and tapping the keys, and this will reach whoever reads it in Peru* (a young person has shown me Google Analytics, although I’m trying to forget it) without me tipping over a single ink bottle. Everything is one thing these days. I don’t exactly miss the clatter of my old typewriter, but boy, you knew I was writing.
 
This blog post would have been about something, but last night I sat down and watched A Ghost Story (2017), and now I’m drifting around in an imaginary sheet looking at the past. And I suppose – spoiler – if I go by the film, the future will come into view as well. Never thought I could spend – well, the amount of time they give the scene – watching Rooney Mara eat, just eat, sitting against a kitchen unit, and be so moved. But it’s the kind of film where you kind of know that they want you to come away with questions and reflections, et cetera, and I’m not sure I…
 
It does have music in the plot, in common with Three Colours Blue (1993), which I haven’t quite been able to take back to the library (I’ve extended the loan), but – I don’t know. Enough. It’s foggy outside, appropriately enough; thick fog, pinkish with the dawn, and I can see the tree but not the harbour. The lamp post is done with a very light pencil today. Time to come back from the real world and check my email.
 
*Hello!

Just had the great pleasure of rejecting the advances of a company that wanted to exploit my data. I was looking up the meaning of a word, and – ta da! – there was the pop-up to block my view of the screen. To find out what [I can’t remember what it was] meant, I would have to accept cookies.
 
On impulse, I clicked “manage preferences” instead of “accept”. Up came quite a lengthy explanation – in fairness, written by somebody who seemed genuinely to want to explain. Short version: if I wanted to know the meaning of the word, I would have to give them access to the meaning of me.
 
Aged in oak barrels? Once they had access to my innermost data, they would use it to send me ads – ah, but not just any old ads. These would be ads distilled from the essence of whatever they’d worked out about me; ads carefully blended from the finest ingredients to match exactly the devices and desires of my heart; ads that would speak to my soul about unique opportunities to find enlightenment by signing up for the latest smartphone.
 
Sometimes, this thought runs through my head: I wasn’t, but were you born yesterday? Turned out that “manage preferences” didn’t mean: specify the products that you might buy if ads for them blocked your view of the screen at precisely the annoying moment. No, the company didn’t want to know what I wanted; it wanted to analyse my data to give it the answer it wanted about what I wanted.
 
Funny thing, but with all the data analysis in the world, all the sophisticated thinking machinery at its disposal, this company will never arrive at the answer: he doesn’t want any of the ads you have available to put in his way. Equally funny thing: since the invention of the news media, there has never been a day on which nothing happened. [In passing, I think we should get rid of the word “submit”. Words have a subliminal power, and we don’t “submit” to companies when we complete their online forms. We shouldn’t give them ideas.]
 
My name isn’t ‘User’, AI. Do they – yes, I know, “they” in the sense of “They”* – analyse data to discover something new, or do they do it to arrive at what they want to know? Companies think they’re analysing our data to find out what we want; actually, they’re analysing our data to find out how to fit us into their own little worlds – and the answer is never, accept these potential customers for who they are and give them what they want.
 
I thought of setting up as a recruitment consultant and walking into that company’s HR department: give me all your corporate data, and I will send you a new employee as and when I decide you need one.
 
It happens this way because nobody wants ads at all, right? There’s a desperation about it. Facebook relentlessly says good morning. Every time I open a document on my laptop a little pop-up says “Welcome back!” and no doubt some bright spark will get a pay rise soon for suggesting that it would be “Welcome back William!” I think the currently favoured technologies are slipping and know they’re slipping.
 
Those “preferences” that I was “managing”? Turned out my options were: either accept cookies, or go on managing preferences. They’d built in a loop – I could manage preferences for as long as I liked, but the only way out was to say yes to cookies. Any preference you like, so long as it’s cookies. That made me so happy. I clicked the box in the top corner and went elsewhere to look up my word.
 
In (other) film news this week, I watched the recent Jumanji remake – Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle (2017). Yeah. Wasn’t there a horror film recently, in which the usual bunch of American teenagers couldn’t get out of playing a game? Yes – Truth or Dare (2018). Must be about time they remade Godzilla again, don’t you think?
 
*Not exactly what I’m getting at here, but Jon Ronson once write a book called Them (Picador, 2001), which is worth reading – or so They say. I agree with Them on this one.

Oh, and imagine the reality of self-driving cars. You turn the thing on, and a voice asks you where you want to go. You tell it the destination. The voice repeats the destination and asks you to confirm that it's got the destination correct. You say yes, and it asks you whether you want the quickest route or the most economical route or the scenic route. You say the quickest route and it asks you whether you want the commentary. You say no, and it plays you a little video about fastening your seat belt. This ends with a disclaimer: the car company isn't responsible for your safety. The thing starts to roll forward, and as you pass the bakery on the corner, it plays the bakery's jingle. Then the bank's. Then the coffee shop's. You look for the "manage preferences" option, but it's disappeared from the screen in front of you. Then the car pulls in and stops. This isn't your destination. The voice thanks you for your patience while it downloads an important upgrade about traffic conditions, roadworks, et cetera. You hit the button to turn on some music, and the voice tells you that excessive volume can damage your hearing. You get out and walk.
​

What sold me on Blade Runner 2049 (2017) was a line on the back cover of the DVD box. I’d avoided the film in the cinema because, well, Blade Runner (1982). Seen that, loved it, don’t let’s spoil it. So no. [Note: multiple spoilers in this blog post.] But there it was, the box, on the library shelf, Ryan Gosling looking back over his shoulder, Harrison Ford looking out over my shoulder, two other people, two cityscapes and the big yellow sticker Please Collect The Discs For This Item From The Counter.
 
I picked up the box. Turned it over. “As bold as the original Blade Runner.” (Empire). Uh huh. Got that at home somewhere. Maybe I’ll watch it again. Read further. New blade runner unearths a secret, yeah, yeah, plunge society into chaos, yeah, right – oh, hey – “a quest to find Rick Deckard [Harrison Ford]”. Who has been missing for 30 years. Didn’t he go on the run with – yeah, I remember. “Too bad she won’t live. But then again, who does?” Oh. Spoiler there. Sorry. Wasn’t Deckard also – no! Don’t say it!
 
Sean Young. That last line spoken by Edward James Olmos, playing Gaff. Mr Olmos (I discover by the simple expedient of looking him up on IMdb) is an activist as well as an actor, with a particular interest in the needs and rights of children. “We all have a choice,” he says, and “If I can do it, so can you.” Unlike most people, Edward James Olmos is older than I am. I like him already, although I suppose I’ll never meet him. [Jumping ahead – there he is! Gaff, anyway, putting in an appearance.]
 
I put the DVD of Blade Runner 2049 back on the shelf. Thought: maybe I will go on a quest to find Harrison Ford. Maybe in Blade Runner, maybe in the original Star Wars. Maybe in something else for a change? There was that film with Anne Heche, wasn’t there? They’re stuck on an island because their light plane crashed and she gets something stuck down her trousers that he – oh, why do I have to remember that scene? I suppose back then it would have been the “money shot”* – and there it is, front and centre of the “images of”. Search Six Days, Seven Nights (1998). How times change.
 
 But wait a minute, didn’t we go on a quest to find Mark Hamill in that recent episode? Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015)? We did. And we found him, didn’t we? We found Spock in The Search For Spock (1984), come to think of it, and Kurtz in Apocalypse Now (1978) – not to mention Joseph Conrad’s short book Heart of Darkness (1899), on which that film was very loosely based. So far as I can remember, going all the way back now to sleepy afternoons in primary school, they went on a quest to find Cloudberry in The Little Grey Men by “BB” – a name that always puzzled me. Pseudonyms weren’t on the syllabus for the reception class, back in the day.** [I remember the world map on the wall, coloured mostly red. Something about the sun not setting.]
 
Cloudberry. They probably found him, too. “On a quest to find” is one of those plots, isn’t it? A road movie with a person at the end – and for it to work, you need the person. You need the golden fleece, or whatever. I went back and picked up Blade Runner 2049 again, ready to be enjoyably indignant about all the Star Wars echoes. And I took it home. And I watched it. And it went on for two hours and thirty-seven minutes (“approx.”, says the box). I think I understand the term “easter egg” now, although I didn’t realise entire sub-plots could be replicants. I’d like that car, although if the sun roof has to fly away and film stuff every time I get out, I’d like to live somewhere less rainy. A child is born, anyway.
 
It started very well, with the land outside Los Angeles gone back to subsistence farming, and Ryan Gosling dozing at his absent steering wheel, and the fog, and the soundtrack – I must get some earphones and move slowly through life picking up and gazing at the minutiae. I have a horse like that, a cow actually, with a(n in)significant date scratched on it (in blue ink: I’ve just done it) so we can go back to the future again and find our easter eggs. Very original. There was a “rise of the machines” theme, and right at the end, a scene so pregnant with a line spoken by Darth Vader to a very close relative in a distant galaxy some while ago – that I wasn’t surprised the screen went black. Deliberate, no doubt. But … how can you re-create/clone an individual from the original DNA, but get the eye colour wrong?
 
Were we thinking through the right details here? I don’t know. I think I enjoyed it, although it’s the kind of film where you know what they want you to be discussing as you emerge from the cinema. [Dead tree? Live flower?] So much these days happens in a kind of stereo, a double-vision effect, as if we’re all simultaneously concerned with being seen to be, and being. Seen to do, and doing. The truck delivering the groceries has “Delivering the groceries” painted on the side. The bus travelling between villages has “Connecting communities” on the side. An overlay to life. “Making a film like Blade Runner.” We carry our present participles with us, don’t we, static as they are?***
 
Reading the subtitles. Happily, I took the precaution of also borrowing Three Colours Blue (1993, Krzysztof Kieslowski), which has “Stunning… astonishing… profoundly moving” (Geoff Andrew, Time Out) written on the back. 97 mins approx., although it’s still playing in my head. I’ve just noticed on the box that there are extras, which takes care of my next visit to the screen in the corner. A film just powerfully content to be itself. “What about the ending?” Julie (Juliette Binoche) asks at one point. She’s talking about the music, but. Oh, the music. Oh, the film. Fantastic ending.
 
*Even after all the dinosaurs that escaped from the successive Jurassic Parks, I still best remember that shot of the water’s surface trembling as the Tyrannosaurus Rex set off around Seattle. That was described at the time – somewhere – as the film’s “money shot”.
**Denis Watkins-Pitchford. The book was first published by Eyre and Spottiswoode in 1942.
***If I ever design a T-shirt, it will bear the words, “Wearing this T-shirt”.
​

While we’re on the subject of films – and no, we’re not staying on it – I just want to add that my favourite piece of dialogue, ever, comes in Taken 2 (2012). Not to overdo the spoiler here, but Liam Neeson is adrift in an unfamiliar foreign city, and he needs to find his way back to his hotel. Something like that. So he rings his daughter, played by Maggie Grace, who’s in the hotel room. He tells her to go to the closet and open his suitcase, which she’ll find inside. Pick up one of the grenades he’s packed, remove the pin, and drop it out of the window. [Onto the flat roof outside – thus, safely.]
 
I love that moment. If ever I’m in a foreign city, and lost, I hope I have the presence of mind, and the packing skills, and the somebody back in the room, to extricate myself from the difficulty with the minimum of map-reading and the maximum of noise. I love imagining how that scene would play out in real life – assuming some other means of going to the window and making a lot of noise. “Darling, could you go to the window and play my trumpet loudly until I get there?” “Yes, dad.” Not.
 
Hard as barnacles. What I really want to say is, changing the subject, I have no interest in your data. Surprise! It’s going to be a blog post about that. [If you’re a utility company or a robot, I have no interest in “keeping in touch” either.] I haven’t collected any of your data (knowingly), I don’t hold any of your data (knowingly), and the couple of address books I have in the house only record defunct telephone numbers. That word “knowingly”. How difficult it is to write a simple sentence these days.
 
There may be data crusted around my online activity, like barnacles on a rock, but if there is, I don’t know where it is, I’m not interested in it and you can have it back. If you or I can find it. Actually – very much not like barnacles on a rock. More … something vaporous and unreliable. It’s also hard to come up with a good metaphor these days*. I remember when we used to talk about Big Data; about how we generated data all the time. Popcorn exploding? Shaving foam expanding as you spray it into your hand? Never mind.
 
I know that if I scroll down on my “dashboard”, I can see where you came from, to get to this website, but the (unfashionable, I know) method for this blog is not to know who’s reading it, so no, I’ve never done that.  Yes, I suppose I might have your email address, might even be related to you (no, darling, I know I don’t play the trumpet, I was just saying for example), but that doesn’t mean I want to influence your vote in the next US election. If you have one. Let me know, and I’ll delete it. Yes, by email, I suppose. I’ll delete that too. Infinite regress.
 
Protection. Remember that Icelandic volcano that closed down air traffic over Europe for a while? Eyjafjallajökull, was that it? [Yes, of course I just pasted that in.] A similar quiet has fallen over my inbox. Oh, a few companies have sent me emails telling me that by reading their email I’m confirming that I want them to go on sending me emails, but mostly, I think GDPR (the Global – oh, you know by now) marks the end of the chatty emails about sport and television from that company that once – only once – cleared out my drains.
 
Always, the opportunity to start again is welcome. Yes, this new euro-legislation hits the chatty-email industry hard, but that kind of copy-writing isn’t included in the standard measures of economic performance, so never mind. They’ll be back. And while I’m on the subject, how much of the way we live now would be improved if we just, simply, started again? Perhaps we need a Global Politicians…, or Global Corporates…, or Global Media…, or some other Protection Regulation.
 
If [insert your example here] could be taken down to its component objective(s) and reconstructed from the ground up, would the result be an improvement? Or – what was I thinking when I started this? – an interminable argument with cost over-runs and no realistic prospect of completion? Or at worst, something resembling what we have now? With people to tell us that lessons will be learned?
 
Love you too, human nature.
 
*Like a present participle on the side of a van?

What if handedness was an issue? What if, instead of wasting time on boringly obvious signs of otherness, like ethnicity and gender, we discriminated against people who are really different? People who look like you and me, who move among us undetected, but who secretly belong on the other side of the mirror, in the reversed world where everything’s the other way round?
 
I am, of course, talking about left-handed people. Some 10 per cent of the world’s population are left-handed. Is left handed. Are. Is. Around. Pfleugh. That’s 0.73 billion. Fewer than a billion. That’s a big enough minority to be portrayed as a threat without quite being a significant constituency. We could move against left-handed people and there wouldn’t be enough of them to mount a campaign for justice. [If you’ve come here from Facebook, where irony is famously not recognised, you may need me to tell you that I’m not serious. The, ah, subtext here reads: the author is caricaturing a cynical form of political calculation.]
 
Big side-head, little paragraph. But wait.
 
Shouldn’t we find out more about these people? Why can’t they be like us? Surely, if we reasoned with them, they could be made to see sense and use their right – right, correct, geddit? – hands? [Yes, I know. Those were the days, eh?] No, sadly not. If you search the question “Why are people left-handed?” the little box at the top of the results concludes, “Left-handers are born that way.” You see? There’s no reasoning with these people.
 
If you then search the question “Why are people right-handed?” the little box at the top amends that to “most people” and tells you, “Left-handed people are more skilled with their left hands when performing tasks.” So we might infer a clear bias towards talking about left-handed people even if the question’s about right-handed people. They’re even taking over the questions. Although that does makes up for all those years of struggling with the moulded grips of other people’s kitchen scissors. Not that I make a habit, you understand, but. Oops. Have I given myself away?
 
Take the trip. If you then – sorry, just one more question –  if you then take up the suggestion for a “related search”, and put in, “Are more people left or right handed?” the little box tells you, “Right-handed people are more skilled with their right hands when performing tasks.” Which is the kind of in-depth factual analysis that makes the internet so useful. The little box then goes on to impart some statistics before concluding with a statement about left-handed people that I won’t repeat. It includes the words “skilled” and “tasks”. Thank you for joining me for this trip along what Al Gore (at least) once referred to as the “information superhighway”.
 
Left-handed people aren’t obviously different – you have to watch their hands, duh – but they are deserving of whatever special attention we give to minorities. They’re not discriminated against, but they do operate in what we could call a post-discrimination environment. We have the word “sinister” from the Latin for left*. Despite globalisation, there are still cultures – guidebooks, at least – in which it’s apparently bad to eat with your left hand. We could go into the explanations for that, but let’s not. You’re an honoured guest if you sit on your host’s right. Among other “related searches” on my screen are “Why do left-handed people die earlier?” and “Why are left-handed people classed as witches?” Why ARE**? Not that I was distracted by that, you understand, but…
 
…today’s randomly discovered internet-fact is that around 5 per cent of people have at least one extra nipple. There are celebrities with extra nipples (and copious pics online). Although extra nipples are (were?) traditionally associated with witches – for feeding familiars, and yes, left-handedness was (is) also traditionally, et cetera – most people with an extra nipple are male. 98 per cent of them, apparently. End of digression. Left-handed people die earlier because of all those scissors, I think.
 
Cleverer. There’s the discrimination that bothers us – racism, sexism – and the discrimination that happens every day but goes unacknowledged. Spend long enough online*** and you’ll tire of the relentless drivel written by people debunking (sic) myths (sic) about left-handed people. There’s an industry devoted to asserting, with what passes for evidence these days, that for example left-handed people aren’t more creative, and it’s just a coincidence that a lot of creative people are left-handed. That for example left-handed people aren’t cleverer, and it’s just a coincidence that five of the last seven US presidents are left-handed. Obama’s left-handed, Trump’s right-handed, and I’ve just found a website suggesting that Michelle Obama is ambidextrous.
 
Maybe “good enough at working the US political system to get to the top” isn’t the same as “cleverer”, but never mind. If the point has to be rammed home that left-handed people aren’t special, although they are in a minority, maybe we should go for some affirmative action. We could go for all-left-handed shortlists, or quotas, or (if we accept the line that left-handed people think differently) we could campaign for more left-handed people on company boards. “A study by the National Bureau of Economic Research [a US entity] floated the idea that left-handers favour ‘divergent’ thinking, a form of creativity in which the brain moves ‘from conventional knowledge into unexplored association’,” says the website lefthandersday.com.
 
Don’t apologise. Oh. Wait. Bill Gates is left-handed. Oprah Winfrey too. James Cameron’s left-handed. I like Avatar (2009); is that ex-marine left-handed? Neytiri (Zoe Saldana) is, and get this. Must watch it again. Ridley Scott as well. Alien (1979); the creature? The film I actually watched this week was Divergent (2014), appropriately enough, which was more enjoyable than I expected, and then up came five minutes of The Fault In Our Stars (2014), with the same actress, Shailene Woodley, who is not listed as left-handed, nor are the directors of those two films, Neil Burger and Josh Boone – not anywhere that I found, at least. But I’m getting off the point. Angelina Jolie is left-handed. Whoopi Goldberg and Sarah Jessica Parker. Scarlett Johansson.
 
Winston Churchill. Prince William. Okay, hold the affirmative action. No need to apologise for the scissors. Nor indeed for that witchcraft question. To misquote the last-but-one line of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) – we’re here already.
 
*The word “dexterity” comes from the Greek word for right-handed, although note: online sources disagree as to whether sinister/dexterity come from Latin or Greek; Old French and Middle English also get a mention. Maybe I could leave that question with you?
**Find that question on Yahoo Answers. Best answer in my opinion: “I’m a witch and I’m right-handed.”
***It takes about thirty seconds.

This is one I hadn’t come across before. Between the second and third seasons of a soon-to-be box set that I might eventually impulse-buy, there was an actor change. I found this out when I went to YouTube to check a clip from the first season. Same scene, dialogue, action, everything. Except that one of the actors was different. Again: absolutely everything was the same except for that actor. His face, at least, was changed. I remember when Kremlin-watchers used to work out who was in and who was out of the Soviet Politburo by who lined up to wave (and in what order) for the military parades. I’ve seen and compared photographs in which Stalin does and then doesn’t have a particular person standing behind him.
 
But this really took me by surprise. Yes, I’ve read Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), the novel by George Orwell first published by Secker and Warburg, and yes, I could probably say something about Big Brother here. But … I suppose it makes sense. I’m guessing that the scene was originally shot with the actors standing in front of cameras and delivering their lines, with make-up and lights and trailers and people holding big boom microphones – and that the scene was “reshot” on a computer using digital widgetry. It makes sense to have a main character’s face consistent throughout, if you’re putting the whole thing in a box. But how strange to be the original actor and find that not only have you left; you were never there. So to speak.
 
Father? You there? I’m talking about the TV series Lucifer (2017-), which has now gone at least a season beyond the point where I stopped watching. Enjoyable, but I’ll wait until it’s complete and probably go back. I was checking that clip in hot pursuit of a thought process around heroes and anti-heroes, villains and good-bad guys, and there’s a brief scene in the first season where the policewoman seems to be starting to research this odd new partner that the plot has given her. It’s just a moment, and not unlike the similarly brief scene in The Fellowship of the Ring (2001) where Gandalf peruses ancient documents in search of more about the One Ring. Research gets a scene in these dramas, but just as an acknowledgement – not like forensic examination, for example, which often lapses into musical montage.
 
Anyway. Police officer. Research. That would have been an interesting route for the plot to take – I mean, what would you do? – but instead, spoilers, we head towards psychotherapy sessions for Lucifer’s father issues, dysfunctional family, et cetera, while meeting along the way a series of bad guys who deserve to be punished* – and who better to do that?
 
Psychotherapy trumps religion here, as does outside-the-box policework. Lucifer the TV character derives from Lucifer the graphic-novel character, and he embodies something for us here in the way that “the rebellion” calls out for our allegiance in Star Wars (1977 and beyond). Colin Wilson caught the wave of the fifties with a book called The Outsider (1956, Victor Gollancz), not The Insider – sorry, this sentence leaked in from a version of this blog post written in a parallel universe.
 
Holding onto scary old nanny. Once upon a time, the popular bad guy was Hannibal Lecter. Now, we have a contender for the role who joins us from a darker corner of our collective mythology – but trailing clouds of rationality and psychotherapy rather than any whiff of burning. For me, that’s the significant detail: the absolute denial that – how do I put this? – there could be anything under the bed. Myths aren’t allowed to speak to us these days.
 
Science has excluded the unknown (I smile at that statement even as I write it) so that even reason can sleep easily. Oh, and I think I’m right in remembering that Lucifer describes himself more than once in the series as a “celestial being” – rather than “infernal”, for example. Dad’s upstairs, I suppose, and this is a domestic drama focused on the paternal home. He’s a mixed-up kid, and “father issues” is a safe, tame, above all containable explanation. No wonder so many “indie” novels by young Americans bring back magic.
 
What scares us? Not terrifies us in that sense of a flat-out denial that there’s anything represented back to us by the mythology that we can’t psycho-analyse back under control, but what fears do we like to have around? The psychotherapist eating his patients? The celestial/infernal being who’s a good boy at heart? The Empire repeatedly building hidden weaknesses into its Death Stars? I wonder. They say something about us, yes, and we could get into that, but maybe also they stand between us and – no, look away. Don’t go there. They’re a tool for denial. Everything is under control and we can explain everything and let’s be afraid of this because, gosh, isn’t it scary, children? Those are our fallibilities, over there, lined up neatly, and – no, don’t look that way…
 
But if we can’t even rely on the faces in the stories staying the same…
 
Surely that tells us something too. As does the insistence that left-handedness (see up top) is just a matter of hand-skill. My library card took me to the graphic-novel section this week, where I failed to find Lucifer, decided against anybody else from DC or Marvel, but then thought: I can’t come away with nothing. So I reached out and took something at random from the non-Marvel/DC shelf. And that’s why I have on my desk Volume Two of Stitched (2013, Avatar Press), which is oddly difficult to find online (cue spooky music; remember the box in Hellraiser, 1987?). Story by Mike Wolfer, pictures by Fernando Heinz Furukawa.
 
I won’t be searching out Volume One any time soon, to be honest, but if you can tolerate – enjoy, I should say – a well-told story in which pretty much every character dies a horrible death (“true horror doesn’t stay buried in the sands of time – it transcends them,” says the back cover), then you might find it reassuring to know that there are still some bad guys, in this case lurking on a library shelf, who are unambiguously, without equivocation or rationalisation, splattered with red ink.
​
*Strictly speaking, they punish themselves, as is regularly emphasised at the ends of episodes.

It’s probably not worth launching an entire new career as a time-management guru on the strength of this, but I’ve found that the most effective aid to getting stuff done under pressure is a very short list headed “What am I doing now?”
 
It’s not that I don’t have lots to do. I have lots to do. It’s just that getting myself organised – drawing up to-do lists, deciding what to do first – is an activity in its own right. One more moderately time-consuming thing to do. And the challenge isn’t getting organised; it’s not getting distracted. My desk is a heap of paper. My laptop is – I don’t know how you would explode out a laptop into an analogue representation of all the work it contains, but – my laptop is a heap of paper.
 
Meta-narrative. Rene Magritte, where are you now? I’ve found that if I follow the dictum “If you’re not doing anything, do something,” I can generally navigate my way through a busy day. I may err on the side of checking Facebook again, but if I have my “What am I doing now?” list to hand, I can almost always find my way back again. If you want to put a label on it, I suppose I’m talking about mindfulness, or being in the moment, or perhaps even some form of modern real-world meditation that doesn’t involve washing up. I’m writing this – here we go; Facebook again – with a reporter’s pad next to me. What am I doing now? Oh – I’m writing a blog post.
 
I suppose I could do it all on my phone, and I suppose I could ask my digital assistant what I’m doing, but no. It’s there in black and white. I’m writing a blog post. Now, if I wanted to play around with a soupҫon* of post-modern referential thingummy, I could tell you what the pad says this blog post is about, but then I’d have to get into the whole “what the artist is trying to do” thing (artist – huh!) and it’s a sunny day and let’s just keep going. The artist (huh!) is trying to get outside. Sunny day. Beach. The meta-narrative**, in which the unreliable narrator inadvertently reveals his true motivation, is all present and correct.
 
Captains. I was sitting on a bench the other say, on Prince of Wales Pier, in the sunshine, eating a chicken’n’mayo tiger bap and thinking about the collapse of Western Civilisation (it’s okay, I know; I embarrass myself sometimes), and it struck me that organisation isn’t just my problem. It’s everybody’s. So I pulled out my journal (see above re: there in black and white) and wrote these words. “There are several reasons why Western Civilisation never quite rights itself. One is the interplay between human nature and regulation.”
 
You know how sometimes you wake up in the middle of the night and scribble down something profound that you really must remember in the morning? And then next day you wake up and what you’ve scribbled down is something like “remember the captains” (which is a true example from my past)? It also happens to me with chicken’n’mayo tiger baps, except that I solve the world’s problems instead of scribbling down gnomic reminders to myself. Turning the page of my journal, I find: “Regulation of money, penalties for wrong advice, therefore follow the herd.”
 
It’s pleasant, sitting in the sun on Prince of Wales Pier. There are families with small children, fishermen, ferry passengers embarking and disembarking. And one solitary man scribbling notes for a possible blog post about the tendency of financial advisers and others to follow the prevailing wisdom. If they’re wrong, I think my point was, they can at least point to everybody else being wrong too. Oh dear – there’s even something here about herds of wild animals and predators. Embarrassing.
 
Bureaucrats. Then I go on to scribble notes about “the interplay between human nature and interesting things to do”. My idea was, I think, that creative expression is invariably swamped: say something new, or invent something new, and a competition ensues not to build on whatever it was, but to say it again, or build it again. Copycat books, films, even news stories. The winners of those competitions are invariably people who are good at winning competitions, but rarely people good at saying/inventing something new; the two sets of qualities are mutually exclusive. Wow, I was in a mood that day.
 
As for organisation, I think the danger is that it becomes descriptive of a preconception of how a thing should be done, thus an exercise in building a box to think inside, rather than a first step to making a thing happen. [Do I really write this way?] If I add the words “Write a blog post” to a list, I end up with a sense of myself as an organised writer of blog posts. With a list. But no blog post.
 
I see that I wrote a note to myself to track down that remark about the BBC starting out as bohemians pretending to be bureaucrats, and then turning into bureaucrats pretending to be bohemians – which I have since failed to do (anybody?). I have also written, “Technology takes the form of bureaucracy.” Oh dear. Perhaps if I asked them to hold the mayo next time?
 
Anyway – it says here that I’m in the back garden planting out seedlings, so I’ve obviously finished the blog post. Let’s hope my list says “Beach” later.
 
*That’s not a cedilla and I don’t think that’s even a c. I was down in the Cyrillic section of the character map – for my piece on being distracted.
**Actually, the term means something completely different, but I like it. Look it up, but, hey, sunny day.​

This isn’t going to be another post about online marketing, but I do have one last thing to say on that subject. Nobody knows what works. There are the moves that everybody makes – the sudden and unavoidably self-conscious launch into blogging; the solemnly planned Investment Of Time In Building Up A Following, et cetera – and then there are the odd, quirky ideas that are almost embarrassing to have.
 
We’re not talking about money, but if we were, I’d say: there’s putting your savings into a boringly safe bank account, and there’s buying a lottery ticket. And no, that analogy doesn’t work, except to say that boringly safe bank accounts never get you rich quick, and lottery tickets don’t cost much. And I’d rather listen to the story-telling of a lottery-ticket buyer, frankly. Yes, I know that the odds, blah, and the security of a bank account, blah blah, but think of those happy little moments in the run-up to the draw. You don’t get those from your online-banking app.
 
All blog posts lead to an argument for originality these days, if they’re written by me. Leave space for not following the prescribed method. If the software wants to divide your work into chapters, but you’re doing it as one long stream of consciousness – either adapt the software, or junk it. Some people can remember where they were and what they were doing when they first heard the news that [insert momentous historical event here]. I can remember hearing the term “work-around” for the first time, as in: the technology’s stubbornly wrong, but the work-around to get it to do what you want is … et cetera.
 
Fool the technology with some combination of moves that it’s not expecting. Don’t even think about trying to make it see sense. Yes, I did enjoy the film Passengers (2016) last week, and in particular, I came over all happy at [spoiler!] the technology’s first assertion that it was “failsafe!” so that Chris Pratt couldn’t have woken up early. There should be an award for the flicker in Michael Sheen’s – the robot barman’s - expression when Pratt points out that, nevertheless, he is awake. [Nicely done, those bar conversations. “Written by John Spaihts” is the credit on the box; Spaihts is the “go-to guy for space thrillers,” says Wikipedia*.]
 
To the limited extent that this blog is turning into a cumulative self-portrait in words, I suppose I’m obliged to disclose that I had to turn the film off at the point where Pratt starts talking about reviving Jennifer Lawrence. Didn’t want him to do that, and perhaps I’ll spend some time wondering why it bothered me. I turned to IMdb to check that there would be a happy ending, and yes, I could return to the film. That was a Garden of Eden they built, wasn’t it?
 
Surrounded by technology, and what do they do? Spoiler again. They plant greenery and – I think I’ve got this right – build themselves a little house. So much for the luxury automated hotel rooms. [For readers who have just joined us, I have rediscovered my old library card, and there’s a rack of fairly recent DVDs. Seem to turn to the films first these days, not so much the books, which probably tells me something – but I did also borrow William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984 again, Victor Gollancz) last week as well. Paperback edition, with The Matrix (1999) represented on the cover.]
 
Where was I? Oh yes – rabbiting on about marketing again. Originality. Breaking out of the box as well as thinking outside it. Not to bring politics into this, but I think I was “inspired” (ha ha) this time by a news report on The President Formerly Known As The Donald’s decision to pull out of the Iraq nuclear deal. Not by the decision itself, nor the speech, but by the absolute certainty with which one of the follow-up talking heads described what was going to happen next. As I say – not to bring politics into this, but we all know that the Titanic is unsinkable. We can all state with absolute certainly that the ship won’t sink – or in this metaphorical present case, that it will sink.
 
I’ve no idea. But the world’s moved on – in a good way – from certainty. We don’t know what’s going to happen, just as we don’t know what’s going to work. We are surrounded by definitive statements of how repudiations of nuclear deals, et cetera, are going to turn out. We are surrounded by instructions on how to do stuff – literal “how to” guides and lists of steps to whatever. None of which change the fact that we don’t know. Let’s get out of the TV studios and talk to the Iranians, if that’s our line of business; let’s follow our own best ideas, if we’re in an ideas-based line of work.
 
*Not surprised to find that Jon Spaihts also co-wrote Prometheus (2012). I think I’d prefer to have Michael Sheen’s robot cleaning the glasses in my kitchen.
​

Marketing’s one-dimensional. Just a tick-box list of things to do. Or is it? If we’re going to stretch this to a third (and final) instalment of my guide to the online marketing of fiction for authors who dislike the word ‘marketing’, we’re going to have to get one thing straight first. There’s no “should” in this. Marketing for authors can be – and you’ll have to trust me on this for at least a couple more paragraphs – an interesting, absorbing, entirely optional but possibly even enjoyable add-on to writing fiction. Although you won’t hear that from the professionals.
 
Spend even a short time looking for guidance on marketing, and you’ll start to hear people using the word “should”. Occasionally, “must”. A friend was told recently that she really should set up a landing page for her forthcoming novel (more on that in a moment). Another, that she should look for opportunities for guest-blogging, and another, that she should think about launching a podcast. In a city, as I said last week, you’re never more than three metres away from somebody who thinks that collecting email addresses by offering an email newsletter is an absolute must.
 
Let’s have some bold side-heads. Behind every Should is a Could. These are activities you could take on, if they came naturally. But a person telling you that newsletters work is actually telling you that newsletters have worked in the past. History doesn’t subscribe to the podcasts that fizzle out after a few weeks. Yes, having a landing page is a good idea, but if you don’t know the term and you look it up (and you’re an author who dislikes, et cetera), I think you’ll come away confused. Even Wikipedia rabbits on about “lead capture” and “directed sales copy”. All of which is fine if you like that kind of thing, but not much use for the rest of us.
 
So let’s take the term “landing page” as our digression for today. Suppose that you’ve researched marketing exhaustively (as, let’s say, you research the technical background of your novels). As a result of all this research, you’ve turned yourself from somebody who writes words, into a one-person multimedia empire, pumping out blogs, podcasts, video series and commentaries – and The Cloud above your head is full of other people’s willingly given email addresses. [You’re now too busy to write novels – we’ll come to that.]
 
They liven up the text, apparently. At some point in all this frantic activity, a social-media-consuming potential reader is going to think: “I have developed such a set of positive associations with this person that I would like to know more and possibly even buy the book.” Your name gets clicked*. And that click takes your potential reader to – ta-daaa! – your landing page. Or to a great long list of your social-media connections if you don’t have one. Now, it’s common sense to have a landing page, and it’s not difficult to work out what the term means. But my intelligent and creative friend was flummoxed. Her problem was, approximately: if there’s a term for it, surely there must me more to it than that? Am I missing something?
 
No, it’s just a page. On a website. People click on your name, they see it. You’ve got one already, actually. The term did need to be invented, because telling people to set themselves up with a landing page is quicker than running through that rigmarole of an explanation every time. But it’s descriptive. It doesn’t hint at depths of insight and expertise and secret wisdom known only to marketing folk**. They can tell you what’s worked for authors in the past, and they can tell you what’s working for authors now. They can’t tell you what will work specifically for you in the future. I’m not saying: ignore them. But I am saying: don’t be flummoxed.
 
Break it up in a good way. And do run the occasional reality check. Not so long ago, you could go to seminars for small-businesses and self-employed eccentrics (me and a couple of others who regularly turned up) and count on being told that Content was key. That’s right. There were graphs and charts to prove that the Content – they meant the words and pictures – mattered. But that never quite meant that we (the writers present) could go home and write our own stuff. SEO, you know. Hire us to write words that search engines will find. Most marketing people aren’t trying to impress you with faux-science. Most.
 
Like I said. Run the occasional reality check. Yes, I have been told, more than once, by marketing people, to leave the writing to them. In the specific context of marketing, to be fair, in circumstances where I knew what they meant – with one exception (an idiot), the point at issue was Search Engine Optimisation. I’ve also been to one recent seminar given by a marketing professional that featured a PowerPoint presentation of SEO done badly by professionals. And I’ve also been told (I don’t know if this is true) that if you don’t do your own SEO, Google will do it for you.
 
They can be quite useful. But I don’t care about any of that. Let the professionals do their job. This is a blog post about what authors can do. As I said: do your job. So here goes. We’ll continue to use the word “marketing” to refer to “the online marketing of fiction for authors who dislike the word ‘marketing’”, but this is our word now. It means what we need it to mean.
 
Marketing is making people feel good about you. Feel good in a particular way. They’re interested by you, and they like what you write. They want to get to the point of sale, and when they get there, they’ll be interested enough, positive enough, to buy your book. A potential reader (buyer) who finds you online will be given everything she needs to work up an enthusiasm for you and your work – given all that by whatever marketing you do. Even before she gets to your landing page, she will have a strong impression that you’re the author for her. [If you’re followed by a lot of people with those feelings, marketing people will want to back you, but that’s another subject.]
 
To foreshadow what comes next, for example. What this means for you is: be yourself, but more so. Be yourself across social media. I pretty much said that last week, but here’s this week’s angle on it. Being yourself is not a distinct activity from your writing. You write in, say, Word and/or Scrivener, and now you also write in Facebook and Twitter. You’re an author – show it. Use social media in whatever creative way you feel might work for you. [Now you do have time to write your novels because the marketing is a kind of extension of that – at least to the extent that you don’t switch off the writing part of your brain and switch on the marketing half; it all comes from the same place now.] Let the writing overflow.
 
Note the “connect” here. If you write fantasy, post about fantasy. Don’t post views on the Venezuelan economy, or Jeremy Corbyn, or the Trump presidency, and expect the people who click on your name to buy your children’s books. Get rid of any lingering fear that what you’re doing is “marketing” as defined by somebody else, and make it up as you go along. Finally, be nice. Be generous. Pay it forward, backward, sideways; be known for your generosity and deserving nature. Thank people. Compliment people. Market them, even. If you’re a truly unpleasant person and you know it, work on your “brand image”, which is to say, pretend to be nice. Common sense, right? And don’t forget to be original***. Below the picture, I’ll give you an example of originality.
 
Mongolian Death Worm. Turned on Freeview the other night to find that I’d just missed a film called Mongolian Death Worm (2010). A truly magnificent title, deserving of further research. It’s a TV film, scoring 3.3/10 on IMdb. I’ve now watched the trailer on YouTube – the blonde woman’s truck has broken down in the middle of nowhere, and back at the drilling site people are starting to disappear – and something that came after it called Mongolian Death Worm: Kill Count, which lives up to its title. The Death Worms reminded me of Predator (1987) somehow, and perhaps there’s a little Dune (1984 again; yes, there’s fresh talk of a remake) influence in there too. Remember the bad guy’s jaws at the end of Blade: Trinity (2004)? Neither do I; I’m far too highbrow to admit to watching anything like that.
 
No, I haven’t seen Avengers: Infinity War yet. Yes, I suppose I will. Remember what I said about originality?
 
*Or your book’s name. People talk about having a landing page for a book. Not un-adjacent to your author website. And/or Facebook page. All closely connected together, in fact.
**I was talking about this once, saying something about Facebook posts I think, and a friend in the marketing business interrupted me. “That’s not social media!” he said. “That’s social-media marketing!” Apparently, there’s a difference. Do feel free to go ahead and work out what it is. I’ll wait here.
***I’m glad you’re doing all the conventional stuff, but here’s the thing: so’s everybody else. Doing all that gets you into the game. What gives you a winning hand is your originality.

Above the picture, we talked a bit about originality. There is a first-time novelist in the US by the name of Noelle Nichols. I don't know her; I only became aware of her because she was added to a Facebook group that I launched recently, with my friend the photographer and writer Claire Wilson (and that I’m just casually dropping into the conversation here), called Falmouth Storytellers. The idea is, briefly: every post begins a story; every comment continues the story. No, you don’t have to live in Falmouth. Just give your storytelling skills a work-out. Am I being subtle enough for you?
 
Anyway, Noelle Nichols contributed to a couple of stories at Falmouth Storytellers, and I read her contributions, and I thought: I could do with something to read. So I clicked on her name. Her first novel, coming out in June this year, is Shadow’s Hand, and it’s the first in the projected Shadow’s Creed Saga. Fantasy. Okay. If it’s well-written. Pre-ordering already live on Kindle, paperback edition coming shortly … and I like the front cover. I made a mental note to find Shadow’s Hand on Kindle when it comes out and download the free sample. Buy it if I like it.
 
Then Noelle Nichols really got my attention. She posted on Facebook a short video clip of her computer screen, on which she was doing some not-quite-final edits to the first couple of pages of Shadow’s Hand. Editing, live on camera. I think that counts as original. She read the story out loud as she edited it, and there was a (to me, anyway) nail-biting section in which she dealt with a repetitive passage on the second page. Two dogs and a cat intervened towards the end, and there was a cut-away to the room. You know that thing with author photographs? You try to read the titles of the books of the shelf behind? A bit like that.
 
My first point in writing about Noelle Nichols’ Facebook post, obviously, is that it fits so well into an argument for originality in the marketing of fiction by authors who don’t like the word ‘marketing’. I have no idea what this particular author thinks about the word ‘marketing’, but she seems to know how to do it with a pleasing degree of originality. And my second point is even simpler. In the opening pages of Shadow’s Hand, a woman with a stick (a staff) attacks a man with a sword. Now that I’ve seen that Facebook post, and thus read the opening pages, I want to know what happens next.
 
I’ll let you know. I realise that I don't represent the precise target demographic for a book written by a young woman that starts with a young woman attacking an older man with a stick, but I’ve pre-ordered the book, and it arrives on 30th June. Watch this space.

Okay, more to say. This is the second, and certainly the only second, instalment of my personal guide to the online marketing of fiction by authors. It arises out of a conversation I had about the first instalment last week. And the first thing I want to say is: don’t approach this as marketing. It is marketing, and we both know it’s marketing, but the online marketing for authors is only marketing in the sense that keeping track of how much money you have in the bank is accountancy.

There are whole agencies to take this seriously, just as there are whole accountancy firms to scribble numbers on the backs of perfectly good envelopes. You may have a publisher, or you may be your own publisher. Fine. This is about being an author. Here we go. First...
 
People hate self-promotion. Potential readers hate it – as you will find out very quickly if it's all that you do – and for example the people who run Facebook groups about writers and writing hate it. You don’t promote yourself by promoting yourself. Potential readers who first discover you talking about how wonderful you are, or pressing them to buy your fiction, won’t want to know.

They’ll only tolerate such behaviour if they already like your fiction and you’re giving them useful (or inside) information – how the next book’s going, for example. I’ve no idea whether this is a cultural thing – a British thing – but I’m pretty sure that if your first encounter with William Essex was me telling you to spend your money on my book*, your reaction wouldn’t be to reach for your credit card.
 
People like to join in. That’s where we go from here. People don’t like to be pushed – by your self-promotion, for example – but if you respect their autonomy, let them decide what to do, they might just join in an interesting conversation, follow an interesting author … buy a book, or series, that sounds as if it might be interesting.

You are, by definition, interested in the subject matter of your books. Your readers are by definition interested in the subject matter of your books. If you were an accountant, you would at this point add 2 and 2. But you’re not, so the answer is to promote yourself by starting a conversation around you, your books and their subject matter. Online. With comments enabled. Led and run by you, unless there’s a really good reason why not.
 
Start as you mean to go on**. I’m not here to burble on about the technicalities, but I will say this. As you fire up all your social-media accounts, position cameras, download teleprompt and podcast software – as you do all that, pause for long enough to set yourself an approximate but realistic schedule. You’re going to be doing this for a very long time – for as long as you’re an author – and you don’t want to saddle yourself with a chore.

My definition of marketing, dreamed up last week, is: do what you like doing, only more so, and more publicly, over time. Have the conversations online that you’d have at home if only the people at home were as obsessed as you are about your fiction. It’s not a requirement, but you’ll know you’re doing this right if you’re enjoying it.
 
Online marketing for authors is visibly being the writer of your books. Over time. The key to success is to keep going. Agree a schedule with yourself that you can manage - regular, but not necessarily frequent. Let your creative process overflow onto the social-media page (again in English: talk about your characters and plot and perhaps word-count). Let your online marketing become – how do I put this? – another outlet for the ongoing daydream (again: it's you communicating with readers - the problem was what, exactly?).

Agree a schedule and decide what social-media outlets work for you, and then put in the time to make those easy. I would say: do have a website, with your name on it, because you can put all the background, practical information up there - reading orders, publication dates, sample chapters - and interested-but-not-buying-yet potential readers can check you out even further. Social media can be no more than a casual interaction - going to the website is a definite step closer to the point of sale. At the website, they are definitely in the You section of the bookstore (actually, it's the You bookstore, but let's not go too far with this).

Everybody does email newsletters these days, and it’s never difficult to find a consultant who’ll tell you that the key to marketing is getting people’s email addresses. So if you can figure out a use for a clutch of email addresses, do one of those. If you like writing letters to people, do a newsletter. I would say, don't get bogged down with the personalisation, et cetera. The downside of getting it wrong - Dear First Name rather than Dear William - is greater than the upside of getting it right. One I like invariably starts, "Hi, it's Cathy here, and..." so on.

Above all, don’t let go of originality. Don't take my word for it. Or anybody else's word. You don’t write your books to be like other people’s books; you don’t just do what everybody else does when you’re writing. You have a voice, and it's your own. Apply that to the ongoing conversation that is online marketing. Originality isn’t compulsory either, but there are no rules beyond what works.

Oh! That works as a punchline. I seem to have reached the end. I was going to say something about the marketing of individual books, but maybe next week. Or not. In the relatively recent past, I’ve watched Atomic Blonde (2017), and moving on, there were those hours that I spent in front of Assassin’s Creed (2017). Odd, the dress code in movies. If you’re a blonde secret agent, you wear a short skirt with stockings and boots, big coat, big dark glasses, and boy, do you blend in. If you’re an assassin, you wear a distinctive tailored-looking outfit with the hood up, and nobody notices as you weave through the crowd towards your target.

I used to wonder where assassins bought those sleek suitcases with slots for every component of their sniper’s rifle – but I seem to have regressed to Grosse Point Blank (1997), which was fun.

*That was just an asterisk. There had to be one. Think about your reaction to it, maybe?

**Although, if you write a text-heavy weekly blog, be prepared for your friends in marketing to take you aside and talk to you gently about the importance of breaking up the text, putting in headings and spaces, and so on.

To write this into my own record, John Bird made an interesting point in his column in The Big Issue of 9th to 15th April this year. “I’ve grown through nationalism and internationalism, through left and right, through reactionary-ism and liberalism and I’ve come out the other end believing passionately that people are only as good as the anecdotes they choose to believe,” Bird wrote. “We continue to screw ourselves through our inabilities to find a way out of the labyrinth of outraged opinions.”
     “Anecdotes”, I think, is Bird’s word for all the noise generated by news media and social media, and “noise” is my word for all the packages, posts, tweets, et cetera – all the space-filling din that even on the quietest day is never replaced by “Nothing happened today, so here’s some music to ignore us by.” Out of all that cacophony, we choose to believe one collection or another of “outraged opinions”.
     Well, yes. My only objection would be to Bird’s use of the word “passionately”, which has that adverbial meaninglessness – sandwich shops are passionate about sandwiches, et cetera. Believe confidently if you must, but you could just believe. Full stop. Or is that just a tangential way of making a related point – let’s be less impassioned? The problem with believing anecdotes, Bird suggested, is that you end up in “a competition over the ‘best’ way of handling what’s wrong with the world.” It can be a “bitter, at times prejudicial and thoughtless, competition”.
     We squabble over Brexit, or gun control in the USA was Bird’s other example, on the basis of what we read, or hear, and choose to believe. That choice – this is me speaking – arises out of prejudice, bias, nature, nurture, probably class, et cetera, and not out of a sober evaluation of whatever “facts” we can infer from an unknowable future (hint: there are no “facts”, because we can’t know the future, so it’s all what we choose to believe). We’re just arguing.
     Maybe the unknowable rights and wrongs of the big questions, however passionately we attack and defend them, aren’t the point after all. Maybe your vote to leave/remain wasn’t a criminally irresponsible failure to appreciate the unarguable facts of the unknowable future. Maybe it was just your best guess. Maybe the sun will rise tomorrow. Bird suggests: “We might more pressingly need a fourth industrial revolution of the heart.”
     Hidden Figures (2016) was worth seeing.

This is the first, and possibly the only, instalment of my personal guide to the online marketing of fiction. It arises out of a conversation I had with a friend who’s preoccupied with doing just that. It may come to nothing, or it may evolve into a downloadable book with attendant YouTube videos and the opportunity to subscribe to an email newsletter. Or, like I said, not. I have no qualifications whatsoever for writing about this*. Online marketing of fiction by authors, I mean. Leaving the publisher out of it, if there is one. Here goes. Film in a moment.
​     Marketing, as various eminences have reasonably pointed out, is relationship-building with people who might buy your book. It starts long before they reach the <buy> button and it continues long after they’ve bought the book. It does if you’re planning to make a career out of book-writing, anyway. The word <Marketing> is not scary. See below the picture.
​     You have three objectives.
​     One. To alert potential book-buyers to your existence.
     Two. To give them the idea that you write books they want to read.
     Three. To give them a positive attitude to you and your writing.
​     [You can do all of these without reference to your publisher, if you have one. It's your career. You're an item on their list. The more you do, the more they have that they can support.]
     So far, marketing is two-thirds giving and one-third alerting. That’ll do for now. To work through those three objectives in reverse order:
     Three. To give potential book-buyers a positive attitude to you and your writing, you need to project yourself online as a writer. That means more than just project yourself online. People can like you, chat with you, feel good about you, agree with you, want to know you, without for a moment connecting any of that to the idea of spending money on books written by you.
     So use social media to write about what you write about – characters, subject matter, perhaps writing in general – and to project yourself as a person who writes books and is entertaining, writes books and is interesting, and so on. A writer of fantasy novels will be a writer of fantasy-related social-media posts, for example.** Social media is a first-person narrative in which you are your main character. Who do you want to be?
     Two. To give potential book buyers the idea that you write books they want to read, write original stand-alone posts, tweets, stories. No particular length, but by you. Yes, you can publish samples of your work, sell books at reduced prices (and/or free), discuss characters and plot developments, and all that is worth doing, but as a writer, you have the enormous opportunity that everything you write shows off your skill.
     I would say: the various social-media platforms are full of second-hand (pre-loved, ha!) material that people are sending round because they like it. Pictures of cats, memes, political opinions. Don’t do that; write words of your own that might be liked and shared and eventually read by book-buyers. If [insert Deity here] wanted writers to find Marketing difficult, [insert gender here] wouldn’t have given them words. Yes, sure, buy a camera. Learn how to use it.
     Yes, I am aware that Three and Two are very similar to each other. You’re a writer. You want people to know that. What do you do? No, you don’t share a newspaper article with a clickbait headline that was written by somebody else and came to you from somebody else. At least half – I’d prefer more – of what you post online should start with you. Be written by you, I mean. Originate with you. Okay, add a photograph. And it shouldn’t be too difficult for anybody who reads it to work out that you’re a writer worth reading, who has written books that might also be worth reading. Make your subject matter your own. Post about it. See above.
     One. How do you alert book-buyers to your existence? First, you decide who they are. Seriously. Yes, I know you want everybody to buy your books. But that doesn’t tell you anything. Narrow it down to one or more identifiable groups. The narrower the better. The more you narrow down your definition of a target reader, the more likely it is that they’ll cluster together. There are discussion groups online – forums – for people who like their fantasy novels to have dragons in them. If your book has – they’re all there in one place. Talking about books and looking for writers to read.
     The narrower your idea of who your ideal readers – book-buyers – would be, the higher the probability that they all belong to one or more special-interest groups on their chosen social-media platforms (as you may have noticed, I’m deliberately not mentioning any by name). Chances are, they want to find you almost as much as you want to find them. Bearing in mind that marketing is all about building up long-term relationships with readers and potential readers, I’d suggest not blundering in with a “buy my books” message, but rather, joining in the conversation(s) over time. If you’re interesting, and let’s assume you are, potential book-buyers who like your comments will look you up and – you guessed it – buy your books.
    So far, the definition of marketing for writers might as well be: do what you like doing, only more so, and more publicly, over time. There’s more to be said – you need to give potential buyers ready access to the buying opportunity; you need to have a coherent online presence that delivers all the information you want to deliver and in the process, projects your “brand” (sorry; I was doing so well) – and there’s probably also scope for a sequel on marketing a specific book, but right now, it’s tea time, so I’m off. Be generous. People like to be liked, shared and thanked in the comments. They return such favours.
     One film, before I go. For reasons best left unexplored***, I sat in on a watching of The Last Witch Hunter (2015) in which Vin Diesel plays an immortal witch-hunter (the last one, although I’m not clear why there couldn’t be others) and Michael Caine plays his sidekick. [If there can be successive Dolans, why can’t there be…?] Not bad, actually. I came away liking the greenery in one witch’s apartment, liking the imagined world, but struck by one detail in particular. In the story, Vin Diesel (now aged 50 in real life) was an 800-year-old immortal, and Michael Caine (now 85 ditto) had been working for him all his mortal life. I liked the detail that throughout the film, Diesel addressed Caine as “Kid”. Nice touch.
     Oh, and I liked what they did with the Witch Queen’s hair. And costume. Julie Engelbrecht. If you don't know, watch the extras to see what she looks like with the make-up off. Watch them anyway. Interesting comments. For a really effective villain, you have to be able to see their point of view. Discuss.
*This is almost true. I did once have the experience of stepping out of a lift, to be met by my editor with the words, “Your book’s a bestseller.” But that was another time, another place, another life.
**It goes without saying (not) that any potential book-buyer should be never be more than one or two clicks away from a buying opportunity. Make it very easy for potential buyers to find out more about you – and buy your books.
***Funnily enough, I wrote my short story Life Elsewhere, which you can find on Medium, before I knew about The Last Witch Hunter, possibly before it was made. Haven't checked the timing - just amused by the slight echo.

Thanks to Tim Grahl for his series of free tutorials under the title How to Build Your Author Platform. Marketing’s an interesting subject (to me; hope I’m not boring you) as well as a necessary activity for authors (among others), and it’s always pleasantly surprising to find somebody who knows what he’s talking about, who writes well. Grahl says: “Marketing is simply creating long-lasting connections with people and then focusing on being relentlessly helpful.” That’s Tim Grahl.
     In a fit of wild excitement I posted this comment of my own into a discussion on a writing-related Facebook page. All in one long paragraph. Sorry to butt in like that, people; here it is again on my own turf. Film after.
     “We talk about marketing like some people talk about writing. It's more like learning to dance than learning a new language. What matters is the doing, not the learning the big words. It's become this big capital-M thing, but even the term "marketing" was just invented as a catch-all word to describe all the things you can do to get the attention of people who might buy your books. Write blog and FB posts as samples of your writing that people can like and share, and in marketing-speak, you're "creating shareable assets". Enlist the help of friends who might help to promote your book, and you are "recruiting a launch team". Marketing is writing and being seen to write, while making a positive impression on potential book-buyers and ensuring that all the "buy" buttons are in plain sight. And when I said "all the things you can do" earlier, I did mean to imply that clever and original ideas and initiatives are better than following the same textbook as everybody else. That should give us an advantage, surely?”
     Enough of that. In this week’s second dose of film news, multiple-spoiler alert, stop reading now, I’m pleased to report the discovery that Kong: Skull Island (2017) delivers on its title. It does exactly what it says on the plastic DVD box. H. Rider Haggard’s Horace Holly would be right at home, and I suppose Ayesha might have found a constituency. And the Witch Queen probably - there's an extensive cave system, apparently. [And isn’t the great thing about the internet that you don’t always have to provide explanations and links? If you don’t know Holly and She Who Must Be Obeyed, enjoy the search.] Endearingly efficient film. And yes, of course there’s an extra scene right at the end of the credits – and know what? The revelation is: There’s More Out There! Somehow, I knew there would be.
     But I noticed something else. At one point, the female “anti-war photographer”, played by Brie Larson, falls into a lake. And it’s deep. She sinks. Very deep. All water in action movies is deeper than it could possibly be. Think of the river into which Franka Potente’s character, Marie, sinks after being shot in The Bourne Supremacy (2004). She goes down. And down. And I thought: these films do grab their opportunities to show us the subconscious, don’t they? I'm currently reading The Hero With A Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell (1949, Pantheon Books), so I suppose I would be thinking along those lines, but ... there's a blog post in those depths somewhere. A very deep one.

We had a conversation about sex scenes. Men can't write women, somebody had said. Men - that vast category - can't write Women - that vast category. And as such conversations will in mixed company of a certain age, this one moved quickly to the depiction in fiction of the other's lived experience during a sexual encounter. And that turned into: you've no idea how that is for me. Could a man have any idea of what it might feel like to...? And vice-versa. Could a woman...? The whole thing ended as a score draw - with each side satisfied that (a) being on their side was better, and (b) that the other side couldn't understand them, let alone convincingly write their experience, so - ha!
     Nobody mentioned Norah Vincent's Self-Made Man (Viking Adult 2006), in which the author describes her eighteen-month experiment in which she disguised herself as a man and spent time in a range of all-male hang-outs (concluding that she preferred being a woman*). Nor did Tiresias come into it. He was the prophet of Apollo who spent seven years as a woman before being turned back into a man. He preferred being a woman, I think I remember. Checking the story with Wikipedia, I find that the first sex change - man to woman - was a punishment (sic) for killing two snakes that he had found, er, making out, while the second sex-change was a reward (sic) for not killing another two snakes found similarly, ah, compromised.
     Yes, here we are. One version of Tiresias' story suggests that he was drawn into an argument between Hera and Zeus as to whether women or men got more fun out of sex. This was after all the snakes, so Tiresias could speak with authority. "Of ten parts a man enjoys one only," Tiresias replied (says Wikipedia; I don't stray far for my sources). For that, Hera - yes, Hera - struck him blind. If I've got that right, that means she didn't want to be the one getting more - never mind. No, dear, I'm not complaining. Zeus, by way of compensation, gave him a longer life and the gift of foresight. Thanks, I guess. Although Tiresias should have retired from public life at that point, I think. Look him up.
     Where was I ? Oh yes - sex scenes. Depictions aimed at getting them right from the other point of view. We could get into Virginia Woolf's Orlando: A Biography (Hogarth Press, of course; 1928) here, although that's more about having imaginary fun with Vita Sackville-West, over a long, history-rich opulently imagined life, than about the physicality of the, um, act. Or wasn't there a recent-ish Japanese animation...? Hold on a second. Yes, there was. Your Name (2016). But we're dangerously close to watching clips from It's a Boy Girl Thing (2016) on YouTube and losing the plot entirely. Nobody even think of mentioning Franz Kafka's Gregor Samsa, okay? We're talking about switching from one gender to the other, which Tiresias does and Orlando does, and you'll need only five minutes of the several hours you might end up spending on Google to realise that this is a big subject. Gender, generation - Freaky Friday (I argue for the 2003 remake with Jamie Lee Curtis) - we're all interested in the experience of the other.
​     I suspect the necessary art here is not to get the detail right, actually. It's not to write convincingly about how, er, this goes there, and the going feels good when you're on the receiving, uh, hah! Lovely day. Must go for a walk later. Because if you do get it to sound right, in all its richly detailed intensity, your readers are only going to assume that you asked a few people and took down their answers. [Am I squeamish or childish? I so wanted to type 'trousers' there.] Once upon a time, maybe in the nineteen-seventies, there was a sub-genre of thrillers written by male writers and with female protagonists ... who would invariably, around Chapter Two, strip off in front of a full-length mirror and describe themselves to themselves.
​     But we're not going there either. Strictly in the matter of writing one side from the other side, so to speak, or any side from not itself, the necessary art is to say as little as possible. Because, if you're genuinely writing about unlived (by you) experience and you want to get it right, the best you can do is conjure up a sequence of hints that enable the reader "on the other side" to conjure up in turn a person in not quite their own image. Whether or not you're writing about sex. Supply nothing that jars, nothing that gets in the way of the imagination, because frankly, nobody can write anybody. Men can't write Women and vice-versa, but if you get the writing transparent enough, conducive enough to the reader's imagination, mainly limited to the externals perhaps, then it doesn't matter who you are.
​     Men can't - doesn't matter. Women can't - doesn't matter. What matters is that in the writing, Men can read A Man when you want them to, and Women can read A Woman when you give them - just enough. Get the writing transparent, conducive, clear - and they'll supply the detail from their own experience.
​     Several days after the conversation happened, I have finally made the point that I would have made if I'd thought of it at the time. Subject closed; normal service resumed.
*This from the book's Wikipedia entry: "Vincent writes about how the only time she has ever been considered excessively feminine was during her stint as a man: her alter ego, Ned, was assumed to be gay on several occasions, and features which in her as a woman had been seen as "butch" became oddly effeminate when seen in a man." 

This may be widely known, but it’s new to me. High up on a wall of Paisley Abbey, which dates back to 1245 and claims to be “Cradle of the Royal House of Stewart” on its website, is a gargoyle modelled on the alien from Alien (1979). Not the “face-hugger”, but the full-grown snarling, drooling affront to dentistry. Those snapping teeth – and those snapping teeth. If unfamiliarity is a part of scariness – it’s said* that you can scare off a hungry lion by doing something unnatural, like playing loud music to it – then the Alien alien is probably the most effective of Paisley Abbey’s gargoyles at their popular task of scaring off supernatural horrors that might otherwise interrupt Evensong.
​     Then I went into this further. There’s a Darth Vader “grotesque” on the Washington National Cathedral, in the USA, and the character Gizmo, from Gremlins (1984), is depicted in stone on the 15th century Chapelle de Bethléem in Nantes, France (I found this out here). I think the distinction is that while a “grotesque” is a carved figure, only a “gargoyle” takes rainwater from the roof and projects it away from the walls. There’s a brief film here that convinces me that Paisley Abbey’s alien is engaged in water removal.
     I’m delighted. I could probably work up some kind of an argument that we’ve relocated scariness – or anti-scariness – from church teachings to the manifestations of cinema, and I’m sure I could find some kind of significance in that, but why bother? It’s a shame we can’t buy gargoyles alongside the pipes and joints at DIY stores, because they’ve clearly passed the test of time, but hey – there’s one of H R Giger’s aliens on the side of Paisley Abbey, and this time it’s on our side. Things ancient and modern.
     Concluding his 1927 essay Possible Worlds (which is the title essay in a collection; search online), the scientist J B S Haldane writes: “I have no doubt that in reality the future will be vastly more surprising than anything I can imagine. Now my own suspicion is that the Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.” I remember once discovering that an argument for “intelligent design” (in the sense, somebody had to have made this, it can’t just be chance, so that proves the existence of God) is that the universe is complex – the complexity of a Bee, say, is such that it can’t have occurred by chance (or, you know, evolution).
     An argument for queerness, in its 1927 sense of strangeness, is easier to make. Today, for example, we have a Swiss artist’s design for an extra-terrestrial monster featured in a 20th Century Fox production of an English director’s film starring an American actress now protecting a 12th Century Scottish abbey. Quod Erat Demonstrandum is probably the Latin phrase I need at this point. You could make it up, but you probably wouldn’t.
*By me, among others. Many years ago, I wrote an article under the title How Not To Be Eaten By A Lion. The Jersey zoo’s lion man was working at home on the day I phoned, I remember. I sometimes wonder what work he took home with him.