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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And promising to do something about it.

And ash will continue to fall from the sky…

…blotting out the sun.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To that, Patricia replied:

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

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

I met Robin Snelson. Nice man.

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

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

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

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

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

Oh, I love this. Nick Cohen in The Observer, 18th November 2018, discussing the Usual Subject, referred to “political correspondents who couldn’t find a big picture in a multiplex”. Yes! Thank you, Mr Cohen; you made me laugh out loud – sorry, LOL. The gist of all the UK-oriented political reporting that Sunday, and I doubt that anybody in this country could have avoided it, was: something big is about to happen; watch this space. Although something big hardly ever happens, and when it does, we get used to it so quickly. Even [insert your example here] is now a chapter in a history book; at the time, it was an outrage/impossible/too momentous to fit into our understanding.

While something big wasn’t happening in Westminster, whales full of plastic were swimming onto beaches, dolphins were becoming trapped in plastic, and moving from Facebook to another headline in The Observer, “California wildfire survivors now face dangerous flooding”. The number of people missing in California is above 1,000, and now there’s heavy rain forecast. Apparently, this isn’t good news (good news isn’t news; discuss): the rain will put out the fires (I assume, although it’s difficult to rely on any assumption these days), but all that water falling from the sky is a threat in its own right.

Third word in this piece is “love”. When I started writing, I had the first three sentences in my head and a vague idea of where I wanted to go next. I was going to say that yes, there is a big picture, but I’m beginning to suspect that it’s bigger than we can see. [If this paragraph ever gets saved in a format that doesn’t degrade over time, and if you’re the forensic archaeologist tasked by the museum to decipher this ancient script*, my message to you is: love the white gloves. And to the ancient-historian standing behind you: no, we really didn’t see it coming. We couldn’t see the bigger, long-term trends that you take for granted as part of our history.]

Where was I? Flipped out there for a second. Oh yes - the bigger picture. Way back a long time ago (January 2012), the “American novelist who is also host of the Peabody-winning public radio program Studio 360,” Kurt Andersen (he’s on Wikipedia) published an article in the magazine Vanity Fair titled You Say You Want A Devolution? Andersen’s theme was that culturally (not, back then, technologically), we’ve ground to a halt. That article stuck in my head; I might have mentioned it before. You can find it here. Andersen wrote: “Since 1992 … the world has become radically and profoundly new.”

Can we agree on that? Between 1992 and 2012, a lot changed? Yes? [No? Where are you? I’m on my way.] But Andersen went on to say: “Here is what’s odd: during these same 20 years, the appearance of the world … has changed hardly at all, less than it did during any 20-year period for at least a century. The past is a foreign country, but the recent past – the 00s, the 90s, even a lot of the 80s – looks almost identical to the present.” Look at what they’re wearing and what they’ve done with their hair, and you can tell a sixties person from a fifties person, and both from a seventies person or an eighties person. But not a late-eighties person from a noughties person. [Let's leave shoulder pads out of this.]

I looked up “goth”, just out of curiosity, and apparently the “goth subculture” emerged in the eighties, and has roots in the late nineteenth century. Then I read Jo Ellison’s article Another spoonful of nostalgia? No thanks on the back of the Life & Arts section of the Weekend FT, that same weekend of the 17th/18th November 2018, yes, and the theme was that, well, Jo Ellison wrote: “Idling over an ancient 1983 issue of The Face magazine on holiday last month, I was struck by how many cultural touchstones were still so familiar, and yet I was horrified to realise just how little things have changed.” Ah, The Face [^smiles faintly, faraway look, remembering^].

Jo Ellison hit para return and continued: “When did we get stuck in this compulsion to recreate the past?” Fashion, film and culture in general have become stuck on nostalgia. In fashion, which supposedly “venerates the new” (Jo Ellison), designers are being “drawn back into their archives” (ditto). Clothes are self-expression, which I suppose we’ve internalised via our assortment of smart devices.  I remember, vaguely, those successive experiences of catching up with something new, from hair that suddenly needed to be like this, to that sudden aching lack of, I don’t know, flares or drainpipes or - no, I’m not going to revive the memory of that outfit. I look at old photographs, and I think: did we really dress like that? In public? On purpose?

We did. And it mattered to us. Perhaps technology is a jealous god, and demands all our attention. Perhaps we’ve found technology’s unintended consequence. We’re so keen to be spontaneous that we trap spontaneity and repeat it - a store put out a witty Christmas ad a few years back, and now the annual debate over big-store Christmas advertising is, ah, traditional. There’s so much we want to do, but because tech’s made everything else so easy we’re too impatient to learn how to do it, so we teach. Count the online training courses in things you want to do; count the number in which instruction number one is, for example: write a good novel, or, say, first come up with a brilliantly innovative idea. Scrivener’s wonderful, to reply to my friend who asked my opinion of it, and it’ll do everything for you except have that original idea.

It’s as if we’re circling originality, circling creativity, round and round, very close, never quite connecting with whatever it was in our heads that made new ideas so easy. I won’t repeat my usual rant about all the films these days being remakes, because I’m pretty sure it was boring enough the first time, and I am (pretending to be) reluctant to mention the review of my book that couldn’t be posted where it was intended to be posted because it didn’t conform to that platform’s requirements. You can’t enthuse without conforming? [Wait a minute – only four stars?] It was emailed to me instead. But what I will do – getting back on track – is wonder aloud whether we’re in the middle of some vast transition from before to after; from pre-tech to post-tech?

Naah. Rubbish. See above re something big not happening. But I do think of technology in terms of unintended consequences these days. I do wonder, watching the politics, watching the culture, checking my Facebook, checking my messages, rechecking my Facebook, scrolling through my emails, checking my Facebook – no, wait, haven’t I just done that? – and just making sure that I haven’t got anything waiting for me on Instagram or Messenger, I do wonder whether it’s time for somebody, somewhere – hold on, just a sec … oh no, sorry, it’s just another Leave Home Without Your Phone message from the phone company – I do wonder whether, um, sorry, isn’t technology distracting? I had this idea, and I – hold on, my phone again.

Have you heard about the Christmas film, by the way? No, not – at least, I don’t think there’s another Star Wars due, is there? No, I’m talking about the one about the nanny. She’s called Mary Poppins, apparently, and she does magic. She has an umbrella. No, it’s nothing to do with the Dursleys; Harry stays at school during the holidays, doesn’t he? What bear from Peru?

Oh, hold on. “All of this has happened before, and it will all happen again,” said J M Barrie. Do you hear that sound outside the window? No, don’t open–

Oh. It’s you. Again.

It’s in the drawer, out of sight. As always.

Don’t let it get away. This time.

*I would provide a simultaneous translation into another language and script, perhaps two, as a self-conscious reference to the Rosetta Stone, but I doubt any of today’s available translation software would give you a close enough match.

This is how Western Civilisation works. We sell stuff to people who are paid enough to buy it. They make stuff, get paid, buy stuff, make more stuff. In their - our - free time, we’re shown advertising. Most of what we see promotes self-delusion, because (for example) roads are never as empty as they are in car ads, and it hardly ever snows at Christmas (although, looking out of the window…). We live in one world; we waking-dream in another. We track the production of stuff and the consumption of stuff, and the resulting numbers give us The Economy, which is discussed as though it exists.
 
That many young, attractive people have never gathered around the screen of your smartphone and laughed together in a touchy-feely way at whatever they saw there. [They have? Show me your smartphone.] You may have bought alcohol with a fancy logo on the bottle, but that was rarely because you were heading off to a late-night beach party with bonfires and lanterns and raucous background music, where several hundred of your coolest, funniest, most diverse (but still young and photogenic) friends were just waiting to let you in on the joke. [Really? I’m on my way.]
 
I’m going to guess that you don’t pop next door to chat to your friend about your washing powder. Or your brand of instant coffee. You don’t conduct tests on stains made by your baby, because your baby rarely makes exactly matching simultaneous stains bang in the middle of two white towels that are laid out side by side on your kitchen worktop. [She does? I’d love to come to lunch, but I think I’m busy that day.] Do you really think that desirable person in that eye-catching outfit is going to give you that expression as you drive slowly through the empty city in your stubby little primary-coloured new hatchback? No, never works for me, either.
 
What we think we think is important (sorry, but that really is what I meant to type) is different from what we actually think is important. Even politics is a form of self-delusion. The petition for a “people’s vote” (second referendum because of how much we didn’t like the first) on you-know-what had a target of 350,000 signatures and was close to that when I last looked. The petition to get Iceland’s Christmas ad shown on TV had passed 670,000 signatures by last week. There’s a Norway option and a Canada option for Brexit and maybe we need an Iceland option.
 
Why are we so exercised about a trade deal? Because it’s about prices in the shops? Because we need something to matter? Because it's on television, between the ads? Wait a minute - are we so exercised about a trade deal? Perhaps it's the being exercised that works for us, and not the trade deal. Perhaps we're just miffed that the voices of the centre (that cannot hold, by the way) never stop for long enough to let us speak? But hey - never mind. Populism has so many forms and now so many definitions but so few friends in the media that it's in danger of becoming fashionable. With the young? Like punk? Perhaps the whole thing will finally jolt us out of this current - or maybe it won't, but so what? There are Brexiteers hiding in the shrubbery at the far end of the communal garden. Does that matter? The dogs bark but life goes on.
 
The music you play is still beautiful. In Falmouth, the trees still talk in the wind and the sea gets rough and bracing and then, as you get closer, noisy enough to fill all the senses. There are still birds in the sky, and clouds passing. There’s a castle here, and last night we went for a walk around the moat: trees black against the last of the sunset; three dogs. Natural sounds are beautiful; the sea is the sea and always will be; life goes on.

You know that feeling you get when you wake up at 3am, scribble down a brilliant idea and then in the morning it turns out to be rubbish? There’s even a mythology for it – fairy gold, which turns to dust at daybreak. Well, I woke up at 2.30am this morning, scribbled frantically for the best part of an hour, then went back to sleep. This morning, I found this, written all over my pillows in indelible laundry marker. I tend to be stubborn about not losing my ideas.

Because I think I might like my 3am self if I ever met him, I’m going to keep what he did, and the simplest way to do that is to copy it all down here. In a clumsy attempt to make this look like a deliberate, wide-awake, premeditated blog post, I’ve added some questions at the end – so could we all pretend that this is the mid-term exam for anybody who reads this regularly? The questions are optional, obviously, and I have absolutely no idea what I would do if you sent me some answers.

But hey, why not? My 3am self wrote this – as follows:
 
Isn’t there a creation myth whereby The Great Editor In The Sky took a rib from the first man and used it as the basis for creating the first woman? Quite a popular creation myth, I believe, leading in time to publications such as Spare Rib and movements such as #MeToo. Odd one, though: you would have to have a sophisticated understanding of human anatomy - or the familiarity that would come from running the cannibal equivalent of a steak house with ribs on the menu - even to start wondering: why’s she got one more than I have?
 
Small children may tickle each other, but they don’t persist until they’re counting ribs. And both adults and small children alike tend to notice other differences than bone structure when looking at each other’s, um, bits. I imagine The Great E. in the S. planned from the outset that there would be two, a matching pair; otherwise, why make that bit on the man like that, and so on? The question of how many it takes to tango would have been uppermost in said Creator’s mind even before the personal pronouns were handed out. If I put this bit here on this one, and this bit here on that one…
 
In fact, we all have twelve pairs of ribs. Sorry. Our skeletons are different, and whole genres of television drama sustain themselves on being able to tell, for example that the body on the examination table was the pizza-loving daughter of the university vice-chancellor who found out about the creepy janitor’s drug-smuggling operation, but ribs only ever come into it if one of them has been microscopically nicked by a blow-pipe dart made from the venom of a snake indigenous to that remote area where the friendly and helpful grad student from earlier on in the show happened to mention visiting last Summer.
 
Snakes are big in creation myths, but ribs just aren’t important, surely? Snakes turn up - roughly at the same point in a good creation myth as the totally innocent-seeming grad student says a brief hello and talks about his holidays in a detect-by-numbers TV drama. That makes sense. But why ribs? I’m guessing: close to the heart. If a creation myth is an early response to a need just to have some kind of an explanation rather than nothing, well, yeah, okay, the first one gets made from available materials and for the second one, there’s a not-yet-automated process akin to cell division.
 
All of the above works perfectly well however you distribute he and she, She and He. First woman, first man; doesn’t matter. Gaia or some patriarchal figure - never mind. We’re here now. But think of the power of those early storytellers. They’re trying to snooze off a wild-boar lunch, but the tribe’s children (of a certain age) won’t stop asking awkward questions, so they make up something about ribs – while ambush-tickling them, perhaps – and that’s what gets remembered down the millennia. Not the tribe’s important contribution to plant science, say, or the interminable song cycle by the officially revered poet – but that chance remark about ribs. Why?
 
And why ribs? Close to the heart, maybe, yes, but really, I’m asking – this is where the questions start. Why not half of this one’s heart, or the breath out of this one, or open up the ribs and take out – what? If you had to make up a creation myth on the fly, after a good lunch, how would you explain the coming-into-being of mummy and daddy to an audience of children armed with blowpipes and slingshots?
 
And why snakes? No, don’t answer than one. What about the absolutely first man/woman? You’ve got an assembly kit made up of, okay, a rib for the second of the two, but where do you start with the first? A lump of clay? Or remodel one of those furry little bunnies? Perhaps one of those less cuddly furry creatures swinging from branch to branch? Candidates are invited to supply their own creation myth, max. 1,000 words, accounting for: mummy and daddy, the rabbit, that butterfly and those primates. Extra marks will be given for beginning with the creation of the universe and the invention of gravity.
 
But seriously - why ribs? Is history full of failed creation myths where the raw material was collarbones, or internal organs (please specify), or toenail clippings? Or do we just have a cultural thing about ribs? Why?
 
And if there’s anybody out there who knows anything about washing out indelible laundry marker, I have a bonus question for you.

There is the notion of "big data". People who take themselves off to vast international conferences on finance and technology, financial technology, fintech, tend to develop views on big data. Sometimes, they write blog posts on the subject...

Thinking aloud just for a moment, the idea behind "big data" - big data as a Thing, with a capital T - is that everything we do online generates data. It's big because it's detailed and comprehensive; every move I make generates more data. Whenever I use a search engine, I'm generating a micro-byte of data on my interests. If I google, let's say, a leather wallet, I'm telling Google that I'm interested in leather wallets. Other examples are available. I know, because the pop-up ads keep reminding me, that I search-engined bistro tables the other day. And I'm haunted by ads for office furniture.

Was I really looking for office furniture? Must have been. I remember that bistro-table impulse; I wanted something for just outside the back door. Item of big data, therefore: William's interested in bistro tables. Add that to the great complexity of data that is held about me. Add that to the location data from my phone; the embarrassing data from my browser; the CCTV; the medical, financial and other records if you can access them; the social-media indiscretions from way back. Because big data isn't just made up of signals I send deliberately. Facebook knows me as well as I can be known from everything I've ever done there; my mobile phone travels with me, so my telco knows where I am; every purchase online, or post, or - whatever other example of a capturable event you care to suggest - tells the big-data industry something about me.

And in theory, therefore, every approach to me, commercial or otherwise, can be fine-tuned on the basis of everything that is known about me. Which implies that all my enthusiasms and interests can be matched to an appropriate provider. I search for a table - you offer me a table. I buy an ebook; you pitch ebooks on similar themes. You don't at any point, ask me what I want, because you're confident that you know me well enough to be sure of your welcome. [Or because you deal in categories of customer, rather than people? Let's not go there.] And you use me for your statistical modelling: people behave this way; men behave that way; men of this age and that income bracket claim to do this but actually do something else entirely. All the way down to: this individual wants to read an ebook about bistro tables.

I don't have a problem with any of this. If you're fixated on offering exactly what I want to buy, at the moment I want to buy it, I'm on your side. Please continue. Or rather, please start. Stop all the pop-up ads about office furniture, because I don't have an office that needs furnishing - as you would know if you looked closely enough at my big data. Stop bugging me with ads for bistro tables - surely you've noticed that recent transaction on my credit card? The garden centre? The hardwood bistro table? Yes, okay, I'll take your word for it that I'm interested in office furniture, but that might have been the time I was looking for a kneeling chair - I was looking for solutions to back pain. Nice try, but I'm okay now. Thanks.

Big data is useful in theory. In practice, I wonder whether analysing my behaviour, and the patterns of my behaviour, is as reliable as it "should" be. You can put together a profile of me and my interests, using big data, as easily as you might draw a line around my shadow. But I move. My shadow moves. The light changes. A cloud crosses the sun. I bought that ebook, and enjoyed it, but today I feel like bingeing on a box set. Sorry, but I'm too human, too unpredictable, to live up to my big data. And no, I know, you can't ask me what I'm going to want tomorrow because even I don't know that. I may fit a demographic, but I'm an individual. Too idiosyncratic even to align my wants, needs and desires precisely with my interests.

Big data is a tool, and a useful one I'm sure. But I reserve the right to be myself. If you want to sell stuff to me, that's great. But keep this in mind: even if I have just written a blog post mentioning bistro tables, and office furniture, and ebooks, right now I'm really only interested in spending significant money on [some text missing here]. You could work that out from my accumulated big data, of course, although it's just today's unpredictable impulse, but you've never even thought of sending me an ad for one of those, have you?

Can't rid myself of the thought that there's an innovation missing. We have artificial intelligence, robotics, the internet of things, the blockchain, early-stage quantum computing ... and I don't think it quite works to fit all of our present challenges to this convenient set of new solutions. There's one more piece of the jigsaw. No idea what it is, but let's think towards the next innovation rather than assume that we've been innovative enough already.

Before it's too late, maybe we could find a university to conduct research into how much today's relatively new technologies have changed us. Not sure how to structure it, but some kind of comparative study of the millennial generation, their parents' generation (who would be the "digital immigrants", yes?), their parents' generation. Not to judge, but to some to some kind of understanding of the one thing we can't understand as we sit here - how our understanding isn't what it was before we upgraded to whatever tech add-ons we're depending on to get us through the day.

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

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

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

Is that a catastrophe I see before me? Could be. There was a clear sky earlier, but now clouds are encroaching from the North. We could be in for a storm. The sea’s pretty much flat but there are occasional flurries across the surface - which clearly means that the wind’s getting up and we could be facing a hurricane later. Oh, and the sun’s taken on that extra-bright brightness that it gets when it’s sharing the sky with dark clouds - or could this be the first hint of a massive solar flare that’s about to frazzle all our electronics?

If you’re reading this, you’ve survived - well done. Go tell your story to that photogenic team of government scientists - yes, those people over there, the thoughtful-looking young woman, the young man with glasses, the older man with an authoritative grey beard, the ethnic mix, the stereotypes - who are stepping through everything in their hazmat suits, breathing audibly and carrying old-fashioned geiger counters. No, that’s not a car alarm going off. Collect a thin grey blanket before you go - as a survivor you need to have a thin grey blanket round your shoulders - and make sure that tall young guy at the back - yes, the one shouting that it’s not over yet; the one they’re all stubbornly ignoring - hears what happened to you (sorry, hears exactly what happened to you).

Bit early for a swerve off into fantasy, surely? Because this could be Only The Beginning. [Oh, the wind outside my window. I look up and the sun’s gone and the trees are really moving - I can hear them. This could be evidence that The Creation, or The Universe, or Reality, call it whatever you like, pretty much gives you what you expect to get from it*. I didn’t really mean it about the hurricane and the solar flare. Life meets expectation. It’s been done before, keeps on being done, but it’s still an attractive story idea. If I ever get round to creating a universe, I’ll include that as one of the sub-quantum rules of nature. But - okay, yes. Doesn't fit with the "expectation" theme, but let’s keep the scene in which the scientists send a vast electron microscope whizzing round and round a circular tunnel under a Swiss mountain – and find me grinning back at them. “Surprise!”]

We’re celebrating the word “could” today. Five letters, not bad for Hangman because it’s short and even if you do get those two vowels early on, you’re still not really there. More useful as a tool for getting yourself a high profile in the media. If you can cook up some half-way plausible we’re-all-doomed scenario, base it on at least some kind of evidence and give yourself a job title that sounds impressive, you can really, ah, wow the punters, I believe that’s the phrase, with your concerned expression. But do practise it in the mirror first. No point going on the news to discuss your survey finding that cloudy days could lead to global warming - and failing to control your own urge to giggle.

He's got himself back on track. That's a surprise. And remember - “could” be, not “will” be. It’s the secret of all forecasting. You can dress it up and say just about anything if you remember “could”. As Head of Irresponsible Forecasting here at the Falmouth Institute of Unreliability, I’ve studied the signs, and I believe that they could point to the kind of outcome that will keep your viewers coming back for more. If I step up to the podium and show you - click; sorry - show you this - click, click; could use a little help here, this remote - what? Oh, press the green button with the arrow on it, sorry, ha ha  – show you this footage of the drama unfolding outside my window this morning. You see the clouds? The sun shining? And if you listen to the wind - I’m sorry, the audio seems - ah, here we are; click - listen to the wind, you see - hear, of course - see and hear clear signs that we could be in for a storm later. And that could develop into an apocalypse.

Yes, I know it’s a sunny day with a light breeze, but it could develop, is what I’m saying. Honourable mentions, by the way, for two recent articles, both effortlessly qualifying for gold in this blog post’s I Take It All Back category. Read How AI could kill off democracy by Jamie Bartlett at newstatesman.com, which is a serious analysis of a credible threat, and Sarah Gordon’s Why Brexit could save Britain’s countryside, Weekend FT magazine, 25th/26th August 2018, which describes a possible future for British farming. Both articles are clear evidence that the word “could” can be used constructively. I’m just allergic to the “Somebody says something could go wrong” style of headline-writing, which seems fashionable these days.

He’s holding it together quite well now. All of the above is just “Could” at work, though. In her personal life, Could is a free agent. Much happier than Should, who lives in the flat next door and never comes out for the spontaneous street parties that are such a feature of life in this imaginary universe. Should is weighed down with obligations, and worse, she’s never sure where those obligations came from - upbringing, education, social and work pressures generally – but they’re deep in her psyche and she’s only now learning to recognise them, let alone challenge them. Could tries to help, and they’re close friends, really, but it takes a lot of coaxing to bring Should out of her shell.

Oh, here we go. Spoke too soon. Could’s apartment is bright and airy, with light-wood floors and tall windows and billowy light curtains that move in the fresh air. There are mirrors and pictures and plants and a drafting table on which there’s always some new design being brought into being. Could works for herself, she’s freelance, but it’s more accurate to say that she plays for a living: she paints, draws, calls herself a graphic designer and makes very little money, but she’s happy following her own spontaneity. Small local galleries display (and sell) her pictures; she illustrates children's books and designs book covers; those are her funny little cartoon figures dancing through the pages of that magazine you like. If she could see her thoughts, which she can’t, she would paint them as butterflies. She’s late for everything, but people are invariably pleased when she does finally arrive.

He’s off. Should works in a bank. It’s a safe job. She has a pension scheme, and although she isn’t paid as much as you might expect, she’s already quite wealthy. If you ask her what she does, which you won’t because she doesn’t inspire curiosity, she’ll tell you that she’s in compliance. Then she’ll start to explain compliance - until Could, who knows her friend well, comes over to rescue you. Everybody wants to know what Could does, and sooner or later, you’ll see her being mobbed by expensive-looking people trying to impress her with whatever they value about their own lives. But she doesn’t like fast cars, she’s never heard of wherever you said, and she doesn’t go skiing anywhere, let alone there.

This time, Should rescues Could, because Should is beginning to recognise that (against all reason) Could is where the action is. If even her bosses are drawn to Could: if they’re challenged by her; if they need her to know that they matter - then what is it that she has, that they don’t? Should is a thinker, and finally, she’s turning her thought process to her own situation. Having lived next-door to Could for so long, having watched her from the day she moved in, having consciously dismissed her at first and then become gradually fascinated, having at first nurtured a sneaky feeling of superiority over her neighbour that, if she's honest, had to be worked at even from the outset, Should is finally beginning to realise that Could is not just irresponsible, careless, foolish after all. She's all of those things, yes, but there's something else as well, and Should wants to know what it is.

There’s going to be a moral. I just know there’s going to be a moral. Lying awake one night listening to the faint sound of music through the wall, Should thinks: I know what I’ve got, and how much, and where it is, but what am I doing with my life? What am I doing with my life right now, not in some planned-for future that won’t happen that way anyway? And exactly then, at four in the morning, midweek, Should gets out of bed, disables the alarm in the main room, turns on all the lights in the apartment, and sits on her sofa to make herself a list. She’ll research sound systems in the morning. Buy a bottle of wine. Perhaps a stylish little wine rack, she thinks, looking through at her kitchen. On impulse, feeling very brave, knowing what time it is, Should goes and makes herself a cup of tea. I’ll call in sick tomorrow, she thinks; I’ll take a day off. She doesn’t, but the thought that she nearly did sustains her through the day.

Could nearly misses the invitation. It’s in a matching envelope, small one, tiny weeny don’t-see-me one, with her name printed in tiny capitals on the front, slipped under the door near the hinge - the door catches it and slides it out of the way. But Could does see it, and life changes. The invitation says: would she like to join Should for a quick glass of wine tomorrow evening at six? Not a party, nothing special, just a quick glass and a chat. Like neighbours do. Sometimes. Not important if she can’t, so don’t worry, they can arrange another time, silly of me to assume… Could checks the time. 11pm. She’s just got in. Glass of wine - hey, yeah. She grabs the flowers from the vase - dripping, so takes the whole vase - and goes.

Uh oh. Should opens the door sleepy-eyed in dinky pink pyjamas and a matching dressing gown, big fleece slippers, a sleep-mask pushed up onto her forehead. She’s seen through the spyhole that it’s Could, but they still have to wait for a moment while she unlatches the chain and opens the door properly. Then there’s a misunderstanding that they both laugh about later: Should thinks there must be an emergency; Could tries to explain that she’s just come round for a drink now rather than waiting for the time stipulated on the invitation. "Why plan to have a drink tomorrow when we can have a drink today?" says Could.

In the end it’s Could who gets them inside, points out that it’s the weekend tomorrow anyway, gets the wine opened, gets them both sitting on the sofa, glass in hand, close together, Could doing the talking but Should at least nodding along, that little frown between her eyebrows showing that she's listening...

I don't believe it! Then it’s Could who acts upon a sudden impulse to-

But it's Should who follows up "Oh!" with "Okay..."

And there we leave them. I Could go on, but I don’t think I Should. They’re together now, still in separate apartments but thinking about it, and this works quite well as a happy beginning.

Yep. Told you. Here comes the moral. Did you notice “happy beginning” not “happy ending,” by the way? Very cute. Amazing how far you can go, if you bring together Could and Should.

*The Cosmic Ordering Service, Barbel Mohr, 1998

There is, at the moment, a campaign in the UK to hold a People’s Vote on the terms of whatever shambolic compromise of an eleventh-hour, last-minute bodge-job of a deal the UK government accepts from the EU’s rather more media-savvy and assertive collection of B - can’t type the word any more - negotiators. A People’s Vote is, of course, a far cuddlier thing than, say, a Second Referendum, and it has the further advantage that you can no more argue with the result of a People’s Vote, than you can reject the verdict of a People’s Court.

Hold a Second Referendum, and you end up with a “best of three” campaign - assuming the people get it right this time - in the sense, they don’t show themselves up once again to be incapable of understanding the issues as clearly as We do. The whole B - my spellcheck suggests People’s Previous Vote - argument only goes away if the People’s Vote confirms that The People Meant It. Add the no-shows to the Leave votes, and you get a majority of people who didn’t vote to remain in the EU. Or vice-versa, yada yada.

If we can accept a People’s Vote but be against Referendums on some kind of principle, and if we can accept that The People voting in a People’s Vote somehow outvote the people voting in a referendum, then we arrive at an argument for correcting votes with Votes. Maybe the simplest thing would be to correct the result of the last general election with a People’s Election, and we can set off down that route to freedom and democracy.