“We’re going paperless!” says the headline on the letter from the utility company that provides me with gas and electricity.

Reader, they’re going paperless. How old-fashioned, you might say. Well, yes.

Strictly, they’re going paperless in their dealings with customers who don’t read the whole of this letter – who miss the bit where they can opt out of paperlessness – but still, that’s jolly paperless, isn’t it? Come on, don’t discourage them. Jolly paperless! Well done! Here, have one of my gold stars!

Even later in the letter than the bit where we can opt out is this. “Download our new App to get account updates and reminders straight to your device.”

Bless! They’ve got a new App!

If I download it, my device will start pinging away with account updates and reminders from the utility company that provides me with gas and electricity. Hooray! Can’t wait.

The letter tells me that my account with the utility company, etc., “is now easier to use than ever”.

Which is quite impressive. “You’re already benefiting from a convenient way to manage your energy online. … you have everything you need in one easily accessible place.”

I thought that easily accessible place was the gas bill. Tear open the envelope. Read what’s inside. Easy access.

But no. It’s something online. And now that they’re going paperless, I’ll be “joining a community of thousands of account users already receiving their communications this way, and we really hope you’re going to prefer the change too.”

Isn’t that nice?

I found an old chequebook the other day. Used it to pay a utility bill. Oddly satisfying experience. I know a young writer (digital native, if you remember that term) who’s taken to using a typewriter for first drafts and letters.

Going paperless isn’t exactly cutting-edge, is it?

But never mind. It’s very clever. Well done!

I think I will opt out, though, because I just don’t want the extra work.

Utility bills would just arrive. Drop through the letterbox. Remember?

“We’ll send you an email notification when you have something new to log-in and view online. If you’ve forgotten your password…” and so on.

Going online to find my bill. Extra work. Not much, but – work that I didn’t have to do before.

Assuming my spam filter lets the email through.

Continuing the theme, a certain credit-card company sent me another letter the other day.

A4. Brown envelope. Little window in it to show my address.

The same offer as comes roughly every month. Credit card. I can do a “balance transfer” from another card at no interest until some distant reckoning that needn’t trouble us at all now, tra-la.

Enclosed was the familiar What we do with your data leaflet.

They’ve been sending me these offers for absolutely ages. Always the same: a balance-transfer offer on a new credit card.

I don’t mind – my paper shredder gets hungry these days – but that leaflet does bother me a little.

By now, my data should include my responses. I’ve blogged and posted about these offers before – and I once asked Facebook, via a post, to make itself useful and tell B– (I usually name them, but I guess they're all the same) that I wasn’t interested. None of it worked. The offers still come.

Yes, I know. Old fool. Ridiculous old fool wasting his time.

But next time you wake up at 3am and lie there worrying about the surveillance economy – and big data, and data analytics, and CCTV cameras, and all the rest of it – think of me.

I’m not proud of the state of my finances, but one thing I can say is: I don’t have a credit card. I haven’t had a credit card since I got fed up with the things back in the nineties.

Therefore – I’ll spell this out, in case you’re as slow as I am at 3am – I don’t have a balance to transfer.

I’m not eligible to take up Barc– oops, that was close! To take up the credit-card company’s offer, and haven’t been since the idea of the balance transfer was invented.

I don’t know what these people do with my data, but I suspect that they don’t read it very closely.

Reader, I have tested the surveillance economy, and it doesn’t work. Relax: nobody’s paying attention.

My friend Patricia Finney advocates the “0th draft” as a starting point for writing fiction.

Fact too, probably, but Patricia writes mainly historical novels, so I don’t know. The 0th draft comes before the first draft, obviously, and what you do is, you write. You don’t faff around waiting for the perfect opening sentence – you start writing. With whatever you’ve got.

You start, and you don’t stop. The acronym that accompanies the 0th draft is BINMAD. The B stands for a six-letter word that I’ve just looked up on Google – because I try not to use certain words here and Google gives me alternatives.

Using the B-word’s second meaning in its verb form, BINMAD stands for Cause Serious Harm Or Trouble To Inspiration, Never Miss A Day. Never mind how bad you’re feeling, or how much more clearly you’d write if you just procrastinated for another day – you write.

You don’t stop, and you don’t look back. Don’t edit. Don’t read it over. Don’t circulate your opening sentence to a Facebook Group for comments.

Your commitment is to complete your 0th draft. From memory – Patricia and I haven’t had this conversation for a while – you then stick the whole thing in a drawer for a week or more (showing my age: I mean, close the file and take it off the desktop) and go do all the things you dreamed of doing while you were writing.

Then you read it. There’ll be a lot that goes straight in the bin, and a lot of what’s left won’t be in the right order, or won’t be right … and there’ll be bits that need to be there that aren’t there, that you need to write, and that character’s going to need more of a back-story, and if the plot went this way … and you’ll start writing your first draft with a much clearer idea of where your story needs to go.

And how it needs to get there. Hate those long sentences.

The 0th draft gets you past the blank sheet of paper (okay! I’m not young!) and it also removes the pressure of having to get it right all the time. If nothing whatsoever rides on whether or not you’ve chosen the exact-best expression of what you want to say, you’re free to create.

You don’t show your 0th draft to anybody.

Obviously.

I’ve just Googled “0th draft” and found other writers talking about it. Good ideas spread. Perhaps that’s the practical application of the annual NaNoWriMo event (National Novel Writing Month – which is November), which seems to celebrate splurging out a lot of words.

Okay, I’ve just put NaNoWriMo into my trusty search engine. It’s free, and the write-up does make the point that the whole exercise can serve as part of your creative process.

I’ve never written a 0th draft, but I did once spend seven hours waiting for treatment in an A&E department with only a copy of Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way for company. I’ve written Morning Pages ever since (approximately; I’ve missed weeks at a time and it’s actually a way of keeping a journal).

Morning Pages are distantly related to the 0th draft, except that you don’t have to be writing fiction to use them.

Start the day by writing three pages of whatever comes to mind. “Do not over-think Morning Pages: just put three pages of anything on the page...and then do three more pages tomorrow,” says the write-up at juliacameronlive.com.

Morning Pages are “the bedrock tool of a creative recovery,” apparently, and I won’t argue with that. They’re not a lot of help with physical injuries, but they do clear the mind.

Everything on the internet has to be oriented towards selling something, so I’ll pause for a commercial break here: Patricia Finney also writes as P F Chisholm, and if you put either of those names into a search engine, you’ll find any number of books to buy – er, read.

Okay, that’s enough online marketing for one day. I was talking to a young friend last Tuesday about the near-insuperable challenge of getting started on a creative project, and I suspect that some variant on Morning Pages, or writing a 0th draft, could be the antidote to a lot of procrastination.

Whatever it is, let yourself do it badly as a route to getting it right. Take the risk, don’t feel the pressure. Getting started requires an act of will.

This is turning into a self-help post. Sorry. I was thinking about 0th drafts, so I started writing about 0th drafts, and then I started meandering around Morning Pages and NaNoWriMo, and now all of a sudden I’m remembering my old friend David Phillips again, and his advice on how to end a magazine article.

“If you’ve got to the end,” David used to say, “just stop.”

We think of electric-car charging stations as things like fuel pumps. You drive into a service station and pull up at the pump-thing and then insert a hose/cable into your car.

Shall we innovate? There’s electricity everywhere. It doesn’t explode if you light a match, so it doesn’t have to be kept in secure tanks under designated filling stations with state-of-the-art fire precautions.

Electricity runs along the sides of major roads. Traffic lights, lighting generally, those emergency telephones you see along the verges of motorways.

Pending the arrival of the self-charging battery – in the real-world sense of a battery that never runs out – how about installing sockets everywhere, akin to the hook-ups you find on caravan sites?

Pull in to a parking space and plug into the kerb?

I mean, imagine if you had to pull in to a phone shop every time you wanted to charge your smartphone.

I’m also haunted by the thought that cars don’t have to be cars.

If the internal-combustion engine hadn’t been invented when it was, but instead, a viable electric motor had been invented back then, what would cars look like now?

If we built up from the battery, rather than trying to fit the battery into a pre-existing great heavy hunk of metal and wheels, what would we build?

Would we invent something lighter and intrinsically safer, that goes not much more slowly?

Perhaps glides over the fields?

Without wrecking the world?

Whenever I do anything online, I imagine that there’s a cluster of photogenic young people gathered behind me, watching over my shoulder.

They’re the tech-savvy junior employees of my ISP – and every other company whose website I visit – and they’re living (but imaginary) proof that we live in a surveillance economy. Society. We live in a society, not an economy.

You know all that stuff about Big Data? Internet giants tracking our every move? They’re that. Big Brother – Sister – Big Sibling is watching us.

Sometimes – I guess it depends on what I’m looking at online – they’re hatchet-faced apparatchiks of the Security State, and sometimes – yes, it definitely depends on that – they’re shocked and horrified elderly relatives who are disappointed in me. William, how could you look at – that?

The usual youngsters just nudge each other and snigger.

Returning us now to the real world, the question I’d like to pose is this.

They may not be standing behind me, my online observers, but they’re definitely there. In offices, behind screens, watching. Taking a break. Making coffee. Playing online games. Tweeting. Planning the weekend.

Sniggering. Nudging each other. Look what he’s on about this week. He’s talking about us.

So what do they officially do, these tech people, apart from sending cookies my way and taking down my IP address?

[That’s the right term, isn’t it? IP address? Make yourselves useful, peeps, and correct it if not.]

What they do, I suspect, is reduce me to a statistic. From my perspective, I’ve got people watching me online. From their perspective, they’ve got millions of people to watch online.

So they don’t deal with me personally. Instead, they draw up charts showing that – I don’t know, some percentage. Charts reducing me to a statistic. 30 per cent of Spanish women behave as I do, while 70 per cent don’t.

Sorry, I should explain that. With the help of a tech-enabled friend, I once delved into the data that my Significant [Online] Other held about me.

And found that the company closest to me, the biggest employer of watchers of me, had collated all my data, run a bunch of clever calculations … and concluded that I was a Spanish woman in my forties. I fitted that profile most closely. And no, I have no idea what I’d been buying to give them that impression.

Yes, and there’s something else. Every time I use my laptop to go online, a pop-up appears on the screen to warn me that people know I’m in Aldershot. To hide my location, I could sign up for … you know the rest. Dollar amount per annum for the premium service.

That pop-up is probably the least effective ad I have ever encountered. Total fail.

The Spanish-woman thing is true (there’s talk of the UK government appointing a regulator for online activity, and I’m getting my compliance in early) but the Aldershot pop-up hasn’t appeared for a while. That said – important background information – I’ve never even been to Aldershot, so far as I can remember. I live in Falmouth.

And now back to the blog post.

They reduce us to statistics, the better to up the response rate on their advertising and direct marketing.

If a double-figure percentage of Spanish women in their forties (not) living in Aldershot sign up to have their location concealed; well, that’s the important thing. Much more important than being right about my age, gender, interest in, um.

Here’s what I think. We should celebrate the glorious, saving incompetence of the technology industry.

We’re not under threat from people who watch our every move. We’re under threat from people who – at best (worst) – devise tools to capture (“capture” – they use that word, but in this context, it always makes me giggle) our every keystroke and then strip out the individuality to fit us into some vast database of simplistic demographic categories.

They’re human. Paradoxically. They’ve designed data-analytics processes that don’t think.

We should encourage them in their humanity.

[Hey, you. Yes, you. Take a break. It’s nearly lunchtime. Go early. The rest of this blog post will be here when you get back. Have a great weekend.]

And we should trust their analytics to miss the specifics of our lives.

Nobody and no machine looks at me and thinks: that isn’t what a Spanish woman looks like. Nobody and no machine takes a walk with me across Gyllyngvase Beach and thinks: this isn’t Aldershot.

Like people in ridiculously complicated spy/thriller movies, these are people who trust their technology.

These are machines that do what’s asked of them – they generalise.

They don’t need to get the detail right, did I say that?

If enough people sign up to have their locations concealed – and we’re all pretty tolerant of low-level tech-idiocies now, so never mind that we’re not in Aldershot – that’s what matters.

The other saving grace of technology – I’m not exactly repeating myself here – is that it’s designed and operated by people. Human beings. All that data analysis follows rules set by, I don’t know, Seattle-based twenty-somethings who don’t get out much.

Yes, of course that’s a caricature. But I’ve analysed the “reciprocal data” that all these ads represent, and I don’t think they’re put together by world-weary Old Europeans with part-time jobs training new recruits at the Aldershot Barracks in the proper use of castanets.

No wonder, despite all the Big Data and the Big Talk and the analytics and the surveillance and the online courses in marketing – no wonder my dreams of buying the perfect happiness-inducing gadget never seem to come true.

No wonder, despite the CCTV and the facial-recognition software and the surveillance and the spy movies and the harnessing-the-power-of-technology, there are still criminals who get away with it.

Move along, please. Nothing new here. Nothing new at all.

This matter of rules. Briefly.

There are rules that are necessary. Do not jump in the deep end if you can’t swim. Do not steal my wallet.

And there are any number of rules that shouldn’t be rules. Shouldn’t be guidelines; should barely even be suggestions.

Take an ambition online, and you’ll find any number of guides to doing it. How to write, how to blog, vlog, reach number one, find your inner peace, write a bestseller, write a screenplay, market an online marketing course, make a fortune, get a job, how to get a better job, get a partner, get sex, love, money.

All that.

“If you can’t do it – teach it.” An old saying repurposed for the social-media age. We have the technology to reach the world with our writing, film-making, singing, music-making – and we sublimate our failure to launch by telling other people how to do what we want to do.

Most of those guides, these days, are written as listicles. Remember listicles? Used sparingly, on the covers of print magazines such as Cosmopolitan or Marie Claire, they were effective. Ten ways to do this, five ways to do that. Oh, and three ways to do the other.

I’m not saying that if you can’t write a bestseller, you shouldn’t write a guide to writing a bestseller. Okay. It’s a way to dream. And you can probably see how to do it as clearly as everybody else who can’t do it. If you can come up with a listicle – yeah, okay.

But the problem with using a how-to guide as your entry point to a creative activity is that they only ever describe what’s worked in the past. Yes, everybody looks to the past to work out what works.

But where’s the spontaneity? The creativity? If we’re all following rules, where’s the spark of originality?

Put that guide down. Try again. This time, do it your way.

Is it me, or does the immediacy of media have a distancing effect?

Yes, and last night I dreamed of Manderley again. What a question for the early morning.

If you’ve just joined us – sorry about that.

It’s half five. I’ve lit the fire. I’m sitting at the table thinking about sitting on the sofa. Because I set the alarms for six, I woke up at five. In my life, this always happens.

I have a cup of coffee in front of me, and by the end of this sentence, I will have drunk some of it, so I will be awake enough to start making sense. There.

I’ve never dreamed of Manderley, but I have just looked it up and found the question “What does Manderley represent in Rebecca?” on Google. Manderley, clearly, only represents one thing in Rebecca, and Google will tell us what it is. So much easier than having to think.

Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier; it’s a “1938 gothic novel,” says my source. And a film, several times over. Manderley turns up in the opening sentence of the book, and it’s a good opening sentence. Pick the book up in a bookshop or look at the 10% sample on Kindle, say, to find out who did dream of Manderley.

But don’t look it up online. Spoiler alert.

Daphne du Maurier also wrote Rule Britannia, and here’s what Wikipedia has to say about that. “The novel is set in a fictional near future in which the UK's recent withdrawal from the EEC has brought the country to the verge of bankruptcy.”

Wow! Rule Britannia was Daphne du Maurier’s last novel, published in 1972. The UK is near-bankrupt and the main event of Rule Britannia’s plot is that the US invades the UK.

Here in what we might as well call the real world, the die-hard Brexit fanatics of my acquaintance are posting dire warnings that the UK will become the 51st state of the Union now that we’ve left the EU.

Spooky, right? All foretold in 1972 by the daughter of the actor Gerald du Maurier.

Except that in Rule Britannia, the UK is, ah, rebranded as USUK. I doubt that Daphne du Maurier intended this, but if you read that aloud in a certain way, it’s an insult. The book ends with a US withdrawal.

Excuse me. I think this may be a two-coffee blog post.

Brexit’s gone out of the headlines, so I guess we’ve got it done. Facebook seems more interested in beach-cleaning this morning, so that’s healthy, and there wasn’t anything in the news about the Australian bush-fires, so maybe they’ve all gone out.

Immediacy, distance. They’re not on my screen any more.

Trump’s been acquitted – those die-hards are predicting a second Trump victory and muttering about the character (and presidential hopeful) Greg Stillson in Stephen King’s The Dead Zone (1979); wow, they so badly want to be proved right about how wrong the world is – and – oh – Kirk Douglas has died.

Back to my original question. I was going to write a lengthy, earnest and rather dull piece about the way everything arrives by screen these days. Whether it’s fact or fiction, it comes to us the same way (and has the same weight: discuss). And we can switch it off in the same way.

Everything’s on the small screen; everything’s contained within a small rectangle. What impact, if any, does that have on our capacity to react?

But I was side-tracked by Manderley. Narrow escape.

And now I’ve remembered that quote again. In 1920, H L Mencken said, “As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”

Could happen, I guess.

And that reminds me of The Right Honourable Chimpanzee, by David Phillips and Georgi Markov (they shared the pseudonym “David St George”), which was published in 1978. The entertaining story – yes, it is a satire – of what happens to the UK after a chimpanzee becomes prime minister.

I remember David saying to me, “The problem isn’t that the prime minister is a chimpanzee; the problem is that the chimpanzee is prime minister.”

Mind you, I also – suddenly and clearly – remember David turning to me once and saying, “Will you stop banging on about coffee!”

Enough said.

How seriously should we take this coronavirus thing?

The pictures are impressive. Trucks pumping vapour onto the pavements of Chinese cities. Great halls full of hospital beds; swarms of diggers building new hospitals.

People wearing facemasks. Those hand-held things taking temperatures. That quarantined cruise ship.

I ask because I’ve just heard a radio interview with a professor of diseases – I think that was it – at a UK university. The interview could be paraphrased like this.

“It’s really serious, isn’t it? Is it a pandemic? How serious is it? Surely it’s a pandemic? Tell me it’s a pandemic!”

“It’s not serious yet, but its spread suggests that it could become serious.”

Which is the answer to my question. Not seriously – yet.

Take it seriously in anticipation of it getting serious? Perhaps.

People have died and a lot more people are sick, so yes – seriously.

But the news imperative seems always to talk it up. It’s a story. That interview would have gone the same way even if – oh, I don’t know.

I wish the news would include a “no news” option, or a “nothing much happened today” setting. We don’t need to be “sold” the news, do we?

I suppose we do.

But how seriously should we take this coronavirus thing?

Oh, here we go. Finally.

“The Brexiteers” are loading up the Mayflower and the Golden Hind with trinkets and beads to offer the natives of far-flung undiscovered countries in return for trade deals.

Experts and economic forecasters are piling up sandbags around their offices as the UK economy teeters on the brink of a collapse more final and more terrible than anything the world has ever known. On the stroke of 2300 tonight – markets will be open somewhere in the world – Sterling will become worthless and the UK’s stock will plummet.

Or so we’re told.

Over there on the left are the sunlit uplands of the road not travelled – we’re richer over there, because we voted to Remain in the EU. We’re happier, the sun shines, the Ode to Joy plays in the background, and the landscapes have that clean-cut look of architects’ models.

But we’re leaving. It’s too late.

“Now you’ll be sorry,” the editorials tell us.

It’s a good thing Labour won the argument at the General Election last year. If Labour had lost the argument as well as, er, the election itself, we’d be in real trouble. But no – Jeremy did a fine job, say the candidates to replace him, and we had just the right manifesto. We won the argument.

Where’s Brecht when you need him? “Would it not in that case be simpler for the government to dissolve the people and elect another?” Brecht wrote, in his 1953 poem Die Lösung (The Solution).

Yes, and it’s a good thing nothing else is going on in the world. Australia is still on fire and that virus out of China sounds more than ever like something out of World War Z (the 2006 book by Max Brooks, not the movie; Brooks’ “zombie plague” originates in remote China), but apart from all that – and the ongoing impeachment of “the leader of the free world,” as the media call him – we’re free to get on with our own little local difficulty.

Kind of appropriate that this is the week in which the government set out to make the trains run on time. Nationalising Northern Rail – I mean, you’d almost think they had Northern voters to consider.

Oh, and did I hear that there’s a plan to reverse some of the Beeching cuts to the rail network? Bet that’ll go faster than HS2. Maybe the Chinese will give us 5G broadband for the many, not the few.

My most memorable experience of the 2019 general election – I wrote about this at the time – was the stream of barely credible mostly fake news pushed onto my screen from the left. Yes, other varieties of invective are available. But. Have the Tories sold the NHS to the Americans yet? What is the political opposite of #torylies?

I’m not a Tory. I’m not anything*. I follow politics as a fascinating human drama, but I struggle to believe that the election to power of one person (party) or another, one philosophy or another, will be any more likely to transform my life than, say, surveillance capitalism.

The saving grace of human nature, whether you’re talking about shopping or political campaigning, is incompetence. No political party, newly in office, successfully does what it promised it would do or what its detractors threatened it would do. Despite all the personal data at its disposal, Big Tech doesn’t seem to have found a way to offer me what I want to buy when I want to buy it.

Here in the non-fake world, in politics as in everything else, all consequences are at least partly unintended. The future seems to take a contrarian delight in defying forecasters’ best efforts.  Tomorrow remains stubbornly unknowable.

What I notice about Brexit is not that it’s right or wrong, good or bad, because we can’t know that yet (or perhaps ever, given that there really isn’t a road not travelled for comparison). What I notice is that Brexit has provoked a sudden outpouring of certainty – certainty so strong that even truth can be sacrificed to it.

In Brexit as in the general election, my side was right and yours was wrong – in black and white, not shades of grey. How is it rational to use lies – fake news – as evidence in support of what we believe to be true? I got lies from the left in the election and lies from Remain since the referendum; no doubt other postcodes got lies from the right/Leave.

How come we’re all so stupid as to believe that (a) we know best and (b) that we can impose our “truth” on others?

We voted to Leave and then to Get Brexit Done. Now we’re doing it.

We’re still friends. There were speeches and they sang Auld Lang Syne.

Let’s move on.

*Green, since you ask, after a Red canvasser explained to me at length that a Green vote would be wasted. That logic has to change.

Says something about the modern world that trade deals require such lengthy negotiation.

The EU/Canada trade deal took seven years to sort out. What did they talk about on, say, the second Tuesday of the third month of Year Five?

I haven’t seen the phrase “Please allow 28 days for delivery” for a while now, but I used to wonder – why did they ask for so long? What did they expect to be doing on the eighth day? The seventeenth?

Can’t take that long to wrap and post a parcel, surely?

Turns out that the EU/Canada trade deal was vetoed at the last moment by the Wallonia region of Belgium, no idea why, and that it was further delayed when the Canadian prime minister’s flight (to the signing in Europe) had to turn back due to engine trouble. Thanks, Google.

Thanks BBC, actually. Went from Google to a BBC story about the signing of the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (Ceta to its friends) dated 30th October 2016. Scrolled down, obviously, to read the story, and found links to other stories. Is Ceta a good model for Brexit? Is visiting a strip club anti-feminist?

What? And here are two more. The nursery putting fitness at the heart of learning. Seven things Brexit will change and seven it won’t.

Oh, doncha just lurve a good list? Refusing to be distracted, I just want to say: you can’t just trade any more. You need a trade deal. And that means hiring trade-deal negotiators.

Trade negotiators, I should say. People who will make the job look easy. People who will tell you, “Yeah, no problem. We’ll get that done in no time.”

Because their whole purpose is to make life easy for the rest of us, right?

Not to impress us with how difficult their jobs are. Right?

Had a conversation earlier with somebody who wants to write.

She started by asking what I wanted – a cappuccino. But then Jess, who owns the café, came up behind her and said, “William’s a writer!”

And then to me, “She’s a writer!”

No name, oddly.

But I think there’d been a conversation between them about writing. And I’d arrived just slightly after the right moment.

Anyway, She-Who-Remained-Nameless told me that yes, she did want to write, but that actually, she was a copywriter.

She writes copy for other people’s websites, but wants to write her own blog.

Then we talked about Ayurvedic personality types.

There’s Vata, which is air/ether, and there’s Pitta, which is fire/water. And then there’s Kapha, which is, um, She hesitated, probably what I am. “But you’ve probably got bits of the others as well!” Kapha is slow, grounded, earth/water. Not, you know, thin. Kapha people are more on the, ah, heavy side. Sort of, um, slow.*

My new friend and I got through the Ayurvedic personality-types conversation, and then She gave me a series of reasons why she hadn’t actually quite got around to blogging about them yet.

She just needed to spend some more time planning to do it, and getting ready to do it, and talking about doing it, and checking the alignment of the planets, and finishing the washing up, and Hoovering behind the sofa, and deciding absolutely one hundred percent what exactly she was going to write, and anyway, she was very busy…

I told her to fail.

I told her that it’s easier to succeed from failure, which is all about learning from experience, than it is to succeed from having a lot of perfectly convincing reasons why you haven’t started yet.**

I told her to write something.

She told me she couldn’t because she was going snow-boarding next week.

I went and sat down and she brought me my cappuccino.

I thought about fear – can’t do anything that matters, for fear of failing at it – and I tried to believe that the picture on the cappuccino (it was a tree) was a ski slope (it was a tree), and then I dawdled around the idea of having the ability to draw anything in the foam on a cappuccino. Not much of a story prompt, but good for a moment or two.

Then I went off into a proper daydream about the young writer I’d just met. Inspired by me (this was MY daydream), she’d forget about the possible cobwebs in the corners of the ceiling of the stairwell, abandon plans to buy pencils that she’d have to sharpen before she could possibly start tapping at her laptop, and actually start writing.

Her blog would be an instant, massive success. There’d be books, a TV show, merchandise, a biopic.

I’d be able to say, “I knew her before she was famous.”

Inspired by her example, I decided to go straight home and write something big.

And I will. Everything’s in order. I just need to tidy my desk and deal with that cobweb, and then…

*I should probably look them up, rather than reconstructing the conversation from memory. Mistakes and misunderstandings of Ayurveda – my fault. If only some young person would start a blog on the subject.

**You should have heard me. I was quite convincing, albeit in a self-help-book kind of way.

Went for a walk the other day. “How many steps?” somebody asked.

No idea. But that reminded me.

I went in search of my Fitbit, which I’d taken off in mid-December and forgotten to put back on again.

Found the charging cable. Plugged it in. Opened the Fitbit app in my iPhone. Clicked on Forgot my password.

Got that sorted out. But no, the app couldn’t find the device. Was it charged up? By now, yes.

Was Bluetooth on? Yes. Had I turned Bluetooth off and then back on again? Yes.

Tried Update device. No. Tried removing the device from the app and reinstalling it. Aha!

Agreed to the terms and conditions. Waited while the app updated the device.

Clicked through the introductory blah about how I can use the device to measure stuff about myself.

Spent a while looking at the app’s new dashboard.

Finally found the menu leading to the bit where I could specify that I would be wearing the device on my non-dominant wrist. Put it on that wrist – loosely, as reminded.

Worked out roughly how long all that had taken.

Went upstairs to my sock drawer – which is the one place in the house where there are no socks, given that I always start there when I’m looking for socks – and shuffled aside all the old manuscripts, notebooks, hats, gloves, until I found my old pedometer. Clipped that to my belt.

Went out to buy some birdseed. Success. 4,130 steps later, I have birdseed and I also picked up some birch logs.

My pedometer’s back in the sock drawer. Along with the Fitbit.

Very bright sunshine. Very clear air. Cold, but I prefer that to the rain.

Maybe I’ll go out for another walk later. Argal Lake, perhaps.

If I do, I’ll take one of my devices, just to know how many steps.

No, not that one.

Posting today to keep up my record of posting (at least) once a week for quite a long time. Nothing to say. The year ended; the year began. Fireworks. Headache.
 
Now, if I was John Wyndham, a morning like this would spark the idea for something like The Day of the Triffids (1951). Lights in the sky, and then something more than the average hangover.
 
Wyndham also wrote Chocky (1968), which developed the idea that a child’s imaginary friend wasn’t imaginary at all. Not in a scary way, if I remember rightly (long time ago), but to raise the question: what if aliens aren’t physical creatures like we are, driving physical spaceships like we would drive if we had the know-how?
 
I remember Erich von Daniken’s Chariots of the Gods (1968), and somewhere off a different chart, the Outsider author Colin Wilson’s The Mind Parasites (1967) - we’d have emotions, and not recognise them as aliens. No wonder I, ah, didn’t pass all of my exams that year.
 
But I educated myself. Facebook’s full of cute little memes about reading a lot, and if that’s what matters, then my teenage self was the most educated person on the planet at the time.
 
I still have an aversion to King Lear (due to an administrative error, we “did” King Lear twice, rather than switching to the alternative text in the second year; none of us questioned the repetition), but I can still remember a lot about Michael Moorcock’s Jerry Cornelius. And his various alternative egos - ugh! The scenes in that cave.

Herman Hesse.
 
The sky’s taken on a very, very slightly pink-ish tint; it was pretty much duck-egg blue a moment ago - but we don’t need a new-year reminiscence about my painting of Airfix models.
 
If the colour charts for those models were accurate, then a lot of effort must have been expended by the air forces of World War II, in sourcing duck-egg blue paint for the undersides of their aircraft.
 
Duck-egg blue was as rare in model shops as getting Peter Shilton in the football coins. And weren’t there coins about flight, as well? Finishing up with the moon landing? I wonder how many of the mechanics working on those historic aircraft thought to bother with duck-egg blue.
 
Who had the idea of painting aircraft-undersides blue anyway?
 
Who first had the idea for anything we do?
 
Who first said: “Before you eat your meat, let’s cook it on the fire and see if that improves the taste?”
 
Who said: “Let’s collect together all this wheat, crush it up, add water and yeast, knead it for a while, then bake it in the - quick, somebody invent ovens - oven, because it might be worth eating while we’re waiting for somebody to pull the meat off the fire?”
  
“And look what’s happened to this old milk. Perhaps you’d like to spread it on your baked wheat?”
 
So silent, earlier. No triffids, but no people, either. The students have all migrated to sunnier climes, so the parking spaces are easier to find. This is the interval between years: the clocks tick more slowly; there’s no politics.
 
Must find a fresh battery for that clock. Before Monday, when the world begins again.

Not to overdo the gloom, but isn’t global warming pretty much self-correcting?

We’re part of nature, so the proof that climate change is happening – if we still need proof – is that we’re adapting at an instinctive level. Birth rates are falling, et cetera. It’s in our nature to, for want of a better expression, get out of the way.

I got caught in a traffic jam on the way to the recycling centre.

In the back of the car, glass and plastic bottles, cans, cardboard, paper.

Around me, cars.

Underneath all of us, tarmac. A wide, flat road laid down on fertile earth, connecting us to the great network of tarmac surfaces laid down on so much of the fertile earth.

On either side of us, shops. Glass windows showing us – on that stretch of road – skiing and outdoor gear, furniture, bedroom suites, a showroom full of electric bicycles.

And underneath it all, more of the fertile earth.

There is, in Falmouth, a building called The View. It’s a block of student flats. It stands between an older row of terraced cottages and any sight of the sea. Its own view has been similarly obscured.

I thought of The View, and then I thought of the millions of acres of tarmac and buildings, car parks, offices, blocks of flats and housing developments, that we’ve laid down on the flood plains and the fertile earth.

Then I thought about the traffic jam around me. My idea of “too much traffic” is enough cars to slow me down on stretches of road where I should be able to burn up fuel and go fast. It’s not the existence of traffic, full stop.

The road network’s a recent thing. The first motorway in the world opened in 1929, in Italy, and then came a German autobahn at some unspecified (by Wikipedia) date in the 1930s. The M1 in England opened in 1959.

The Wikipedia page Evolution of motorway construction in European nations shows far more dramatic rises than anything about global temperature.

If you seek our monument, look around you. We’ve tanked the landscape with non-porous tarmac.

[For those of us without experience of damp cellars, “tanking refers to the application of a waterproof coating, effectively making the walls permanently watertight.” Cut down from the definition on permagard.co.uk’s advice page. Thanks.]

When I got home, I looked up “global birth rate” on Google. Pew Research Centre’s FactTank tells me: “For the first time in modern history, the world’s population is expected to virtually stop growing by the end of this century, due in large part to falling global fertility rates.”

But are we preventing ourselves quickly enough? Will climate change get there first? Maybe our instincts will give us more arguments, relationship break-ups, disagreements?

Ironic, I’d say, if the argumentative angels of our nature goaded us to salvation.

Most of the mud thrown at me during the election campaign was intended to hit Boris Johnson. He was variously, flamboyantly wrong on so many levels, I was told, mainly via Facebook.

Never mind Freddie Starr eating anybody’s hamster; Boris Johnson was apparently munching his way through the entire pet shop.

Most of this drivel came in the form of headlines shared from real and unreal news sources, often based on unsubstantiated “research” or revealed by “a major survey” of which no details were given. None of it was convincing; you had to want to believe.

Once, the online “newspaper” was so clearly faked up for the occasion that it carried only one story, alongside a sidebar that read “In this sidebar, you can add text…” et cetera.

I suppose there was some appeal to confirmation bias, or maybe it was just plain stupidity that accounted for the relentless oversharing. I live in a Labour council ward, on a street in which every window instructed me to vote Labour, so I suppose the idea must have been to preach to the converted. Not to convince anybody else.

They were, now I come to think of it with hindsight, throwing their trash at the core vote.

Perhaps in Conservative areas, the clumsy fakery was directed at Jeremy Corbyn. I don’t know. Maybe. But.

I did quietly laugh at a friend’s blog post in which she claimed that “According to First Draft who analysed the ads used by all parties in the first four days of December, Tory Facebook ads were 88% misleading, against Labour’s 0%.”

No disrespect to First Draft and never mind the advertising*; I know what was being thrown at me via Facebook.

No, I’m not making a political point; yes, I’m sure the other side are just as bad; now, can we get on?

About half-way through the campaign, I spoke to an official Labour person (who happens to be a friend) about all the mendacious, vindictive, not-even-half-true [expletive deleted] that was coming my way. Private conversation. “It’s hurting us,” was the response.

And I think that’s the take-away for me. Fake news reveals the character of the faker. It traduces its own side of the argument. To do anything else – indeed, to be effective at all – it has to be more than thrown-together nonsense.

And it never is. Even in a big-time serious even-the-Russians-must-be-watching global-headline event like a British general election, the fake news is done so badly that it doesn’t work.

I find that reassuring.

*Except – maybe Facebook advertising does work? Worrying thought.

Just briefly. In the post-election Weekend FT, there was some worthwhile analysis and commentary in the main paper.

In the separate Life & Arts section, there was a front-page story about the trend towards creating “virtual celebrities” – people who don’t exist, who express views, endorse products, attract followers.

A company named A-fun Interactive has a “soul-extractor” room in which the likenesses of real people are taken for the construction of their avatars.

Very amusing.

There are avatars of real people operating independently - avatars of real people who have passed through that room - and also there are “virtual celebrities” who don’t exist anywhere at all. These truly virtual celebrities are likenesses of nothing - likenesses of the void.

They express views. They endorse products. They don't exist.

Having written several pieces recently about fake news, for example above the picture, I don’t know how to take this.

Perhaps our lives, like the print editions of newspapers, are separated into sections.

In the politics section, we’re bothered by fake news. In the culture section, we’re excited by the building of totally fake people.

Perhaps next time, in five years or however long, politicians’ avatars will tour the constituencies denouncing the other side’s use of fake news.

While their souls stay at home.

Pleasant to be writing this with the result still two days away. With the future – which will seem so inevitable once hindsight kicks in – still unknown.

A letter came from the Prime Minister this morning. A man named Johnson. For all I know, he’ll still be Prime Minister when you read this.

An actual letter. Clever man. He must have guessed that I would eventually “snooze” the entire population of Facebook in my ongoing effort to mute the politics. I couldn’t tell you what he said, because I shredded his letter as soon as I realised what it was, but I did pick up the gist. He and I want the same things, he told me. Hah!

The envelope was a muted yellow, with a window in it. Sender’s address on the flap was “CCHQ”, which I didn’t recognise – surely they were always at Central Office and that was always in Smith Square? I tore it open.

CCHQ? GCHQ? Time to grab the go-bag and run? Oh, no, wait a second. Politics. “Dear William Essex,” wrote the Prime Minister. That, in itself, was a refreshing change from “Dear WILLIAMESSEX” or “Dear MISTERWILLIAM” or “Dear (f)name,” but I suppose the politicians hire only the best tech people.

The man wanted something. There were pictures. At lunchtime I wandered down to the sandwich shop, where the staff were wearing red Christmas hats and the music was asking “Do they know it’s Christmas?” Thought of suggesting that “Won’t get fooled again” would be even more seasonal, but I’m already an old guy in a crumpled overcoat sitting at their corner table – don’t want to worry them any further.

It’s cold despite the sunshine and I’ve just put on the heating to take the edge off. [The rest of this paragraph was added later, causing a continuity error regarding the weather. Never mind.] It's grey outside. Drizzly rain. Sea merged into sky.

To take the other edge off, I’ve just made myself a large mug of tea and some toast and black-cherry jam. Comfort eating, I suppose. Yes, thank you, I have a book to read, and a sofa.

Work to do as well, but procrastination is a fine art for a Winter’s afternoon. The light is fading. Still a week at least until the shortest day.

Outside, the wind howls [see above re continuity] and the political battle rages for a few more days [hours]. In here, I just have to remember to keep the TV and radio off.

It’ll be over by Christmas, I suppose.

By Friday lunchtime, the winner will be making good on his (her?) promises to solve all our problems within hours, days, weeks of victory, and the rest of us can get on with the important work of being here – working, resting, playing, volunteering, socialising, opening the curtains in the mornings, turning on the lights in the evenings (so far, not a single - edit: so far, only one - canvasser has caught me in), turning on the radio and then off again quickly, and waiting for the world to end.

Politics needs problems more than it needs solutions, doesn’t it? Politics needs us all worried enough to vote.

And yet this time, sea levels really are rising and vast areas of the world really are on fire. How does it feel to be accountable for solving those problems, Prime Minister?

Let’s hold a summit and set some targets, eh? That'll work.

Would somebody kindly remind me why we have to sit at the top table in all these metaphors about international relations?

We’d be no less a country for taking a back seat while China, USA, Russia face off against each other. We wouldn’t end up head-to-head with Iran if we retreated into the Celtic fringe.

The notion of a “special relationship” with the USA is borderline ridiculous, for a start. If we were anywhere near equals, we’d have a relationship. It’s “special” because we claim a relationship beyond our means and they humour us – sorry, humor us.

Also because we speak a similar language and share a history. But today? Come on.

There was an empire and then there was a commonwealth, and – this just in – I’m told by Google that The Commonwealth of Nations still exists.

Unexpected foreign leaders do still turn out to have been educated at a well-known private boarding school down the road from here – that’s “here” in the sense of where my smart (sic, ha ha, smart) phone thinks I am, not where I am – and apparently we do still “punch above our weight” in diplomacy, which must annoy people heavier than us.

Sooner or later, the lightweight who insists on getting between the heavyweights – what’s the phrase? – gets stomped into the ground. Pulverised with a light flick of a ballistic missile.

Tourism is the unique selling point, isn’t it? We’re a great venue. Maybe our diplomats should go back to wearing Elizabethan costume. Maybe we should stop deluding ourselves and accept our destiny as a leading player in the global, geopolitical hospitality industry.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“To be or–”

“I’m asking about the question.”

“To be–”

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

“To–”

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

“Whether ‘tis nobler in the–”

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

“There are more things–”

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

“There are more things in–”

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

“There are more things in heaven and earth–”

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

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

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

Roll credits. Fade.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And laughter was general over England.

Oh, politics.

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

Sorry.

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

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

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

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

More interventions by politicians, I mean.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

European Union peacekeepers fly into Northern Ireland.

Donald Trump appeals for calm.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Samphire - spinach.

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

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

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

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

Diplomatic relations are established between Liverpool and Brussels.

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

EU leaders declare the English sense of humour unacceptable.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

England’s cheese-cracker industry enjoys a boost.

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

He’s exiled for his own protection.

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

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

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

We all live happily ever after, ha ha.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“No.”

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

“Okay,” he says.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Well, yeah.”

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

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

“Thank you. But I don’t think–”

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

“You caught that. When Stace–”

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

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

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

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

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

“And you’re not.”

“You know that thing with Medium last week?”

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

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

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

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

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

“I’ve only just posted that.”

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

“Shh!”

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

“To get back on track.”

“Sorry.”

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

“Looking for short stories?”

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

“You know, this is just too shameless.”

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

“Watch it! The picture!”

“Yikes! See you on the other side.”

“That was close! Where was I?”

“Showing rather than telling.”

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

“Info-dumps.”

“Dialogue, even.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Brexit? The election?”

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

“How about you tell me for once?”

“Okay, well, I did have this idea…”

Fade. Roll credits.

How do we disagree?

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I said I’m sorry.”

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

“Too late.”

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

He could still hear the two voices in the lamp.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Eek!” said Pipsqueak.

He was staring into eyes not his own.

The eyes stared back.

And then – something else happened.

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

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

"Aaaargh!" said Pipsqueak.

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

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

How can I help?" said the genie.

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

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

"I know that road," said Pipsqueak.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pipsqueak had never seen The Mage look sheepish before.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But Pipsqueak rounded on him before he could get started.

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

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

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

“How rich?”

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

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

Continued after the picture.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The kitten pounced up onto the witch’s lap.

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

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

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

The kitten braced itself, and jumped.

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

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

“I can. I just did.”

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

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

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

“My what?”

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

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

“Hang on, what’s this?”

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

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

But his head. Yes, it was his head.

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

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

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

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

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

“I thought I was writing this.”

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

“It only rains at night in fantasy novels.”

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

“But you must have seen some beautiful–”

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

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

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

He lay very still.

“You’ve said that.”

He continued to lay very still.

That sound; what was it?

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

“Yes. Shh.”

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

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

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

“Carpet now? Very fancy.”

“Shh!”

“Sorry.”

“Shhhh!”

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

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

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

What a weird idea, Pipsqueak thought.

“He’s never seen the sea, you idiot!”

“Shhhh!”

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

“And that’s seashells, anyway.”

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

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

“Not that kind of flight!”

“I said – shhhh!” 

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

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

But – two voices?

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

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

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

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

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

Now there would be magic not of its making.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Inside the tent, Pipsqueak began to polish the lamp.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Imagine an organisation where the faces change.

Where the opportunities open up because people move on.

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

“Grumpy again today, aren’t we?”

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

“Sorry.”

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

“It’s just that–”

“Not yet!”

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

“You’re just in a bad mood.”

“Have you seen the news recently?”

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

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

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

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

“A really bad mood.”

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

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

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

“I was, but–”

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

“Ed, I just wanted to say–”

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

“And the false promises of education.”

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

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

“Do some research,” he murmurs.

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

“Unreliable narrator, more like.”

“Besides, I’d fall off.”

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

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

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

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

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

“It just came to me.”

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

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

“The one that summons you.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I thought you said they were asleep.”

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

Everybody in the camp was asleep.

“Except the kitten.”

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

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

As the kitten watched, the knot untied itself.

The backpack fell open, spilling its contents.

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

“Oh, too easy.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You are interested in this story for two reasons.

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

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

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

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

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