Phew, What A Scorcher!

In case it's lost on you, the title of this post is the traditional tabloid front-page splash headline to mark a couple of days of hot weather in a typically wet and mild British summer. But so far this year we have had a succession of five designated "heatwaves", and most of the UK is now officially in drought. This is distinctly not normal. If I hear another idiot say, "If this is climate change, bring it on!", I will... Well, let's not be specific. We don't want "premeditation" added to the charge sheet.

Never mind two days of "scorcher" somewhere in mid-August, it has now been too hot and too dry since May, with no end in sight. I sat my university final exams in the famously hot and dry summer of 1976 – eight (or was it nine?) three-hour papers sweltering in "subfusc" (a black suit with white tie, plus academic cap and gown) – and it was nothing like as bad as this, and all I have to do now is write the odd blog post and venture out for a walk and a bit of shopping in shorts and sandals. For the first time ever I am using sunscreen: that's how bad it is. Others have it far worse, of course: it's hard to imagine losing your entire home and belongings to a wildfire, especially in the knowledge that it was sparked by irresponsible or even deliberate behaviour.

These harshly bright and contrasty conditions are never ideal for photography and, besides, who wants to lug a camera around in such heat for essentially unrewarding results? This is where a phone comes into its own and, even on those occasions when I did actually put a camera in my bag, it was the phone I pulled out of my pocket more often than not. I think you'd be hard-pressed to tell which were taken with which, though, in this little gallery of Summer So Far photographs.

West Bexington, Dorset

Bristol Downs, green grass reduced to felted straw

Fishing on Clevedon Pier, North Somerset

Clevedon Pier

Jubilee Gardens, Belvedere Road, London

Forde Abbey, Dorset

Morcombelake, Dorset

Chesil Beach from Abbotsbury Tropical Gardens

(and, yes, the sea really was that amazing Mediterranean colour)

St. Catherine's Chapel from Abbotsbury Tropical Gardens

Thanks, but when I said it's so hot I fancy a cone...

(Abbotsbury Gardens)

Southern view from our Bristol flat's kitchen

Slightly later western view from the kitchen

(Get on with the cooking, Mike, you can't eat gaudy sunsets...)

On the early evening of 12th August we had the very rare spectacle of an almost complete solar eclipse (92.55% in Southampton). There won't be another one here for 80 years; I doubt I'll be very interested by then. TBH a  partial eclipse is a fairly underwhelming spectacle, anyway, unless you're properly set up and situated to see the solar disc being covered up without permanently damaging your eyesight, especially when it's happening low in the sky, not long before sunset. It occurred to me to wonder how many folk were walking around with impaired vision in ancient times, having gazed for far too long at the uncanny solar spectacle taking place overhead. I was also surprised by how few commentators remarked on the absurdly mind-blowing coincidence that the moon and sun are exactly the same size when observed from our planet. I mean... Wow, WTF, man?

But, as it happened, we didn't have to go far to see what was going on in a surprising and moderately spectacular fashion. In fact, we simply stepped outside the front door and gazed at the walls of the houses on the opposite side of the road, where multiple images of the sun were being pinholed and projected by the leaves on the trees behind our house.

 No cardboard, sticky tape, or mirrors required. Unlike our eclipse craft project last time round, on holiday in Norfolk in August 1999. Happy days!

image: The National Archives, cat. ref. MFQ 1/712

Mottisfont Abbey 2006

It is often said that it can be useful to leave off evaluating your photographs until you can see them as if they had been taken by somebody else. Certainly, twenty years seems to have been long enough to do the trick.

In summer 2006 I was still tinkering with a project photographing at Mottisfont Abbey, a National Trust property near Romsey in Hampshire. I had started the project a few years earlier, concentrating on the river Test that flows through the grounds, and using an old Agfa Isolette folding camera that used 120 medium-format film. This led to my first real solo exhibition, The Colour of the Water, which was on display in the Abbey for eighteen months, March 2003 - November 2004, and then – augmented with digital photographs – to my self-published book Downward Skies.

By 2006 I had acquired a Canon EOS 350D digital camera (eight megapixels!), and had broadened my attention to the whole of the grounds at Mottisfont. I ended up making a portfolio of monochrome images that, until very recently, I had forgotten all about. Looking for something completely different, out of curiosity I opened a folder labelled "Mottisfont" on a backup drive, and was amazed to see the work of this other person, who is apparently me aged 52 years.

So here is a little gallery of a dozen of those photos taken by that stranger. They are "as found". I wouldn't choose to make them that way now – too contrasty! Do something about those blocked-up shadows and clipped highlights! – but that's the whole point. This is how he liked to do it then, and why I find them so striking now. Not a bad effort, young man, not at all bad.

Hmm, I wonder if I might be looking at next year's calendar? There are plenty more to choose where these came from... 

Everywhere I Go

Although the onset of tinnitus and partial deafness mean that I listen to music sparingly these days – "listen" in the sense of actually putting a CD into the stereo (and I'm afraid I will always think of whatever a music-playing machine is actually called as a "stereo") – I do nonetheless frequently dip into my bookmarked YouTube musical offerings and even explore their accompanying suggested playlists while I'm sitting here at my computer trying to think up fresh ways of continuing this self-imposed Reithian mission to inform, educate, and entertain. It seems that pair of cheap little desktop speakers don't rattle my hearing apparatus quite so badly.

I don't know how typical this is, but I am highly susceptible to that irritating phenomenon known as an "earworm" or, less disgustingly, "involuntary musical imagery" (INMI): songs and tunes that become an inescapable inner soundtrack, in my case sometimes lasting for days. I regularly find myself singing and humming along sotto voce to the same song, quite often finding in the process that I haven't yet got the tune or the lyrics – particularly the phrasing – quite right. For a long time I was tormented by Richard Thompson's "1952 Vincent Black Lightning", for example, but I think I've got it down now. Nonetheless, that song with its tricksy guitar accompaniment still takes up residence in my head whenever I hear it, or even when just a fragment of the lyrics flickers into consciousness. [1] Add to that the dozens of other mental musical squatters in there and it can feel like I'm a walking jukebox, but an annoying one that tends to get stuck, playing the same track over and over on repeat.

Regular readers will know that I have often mentioned the music of Jackson Browne. I wouldn't describe myself as a "fan" –  apart from the two-CD Solo Acoustic collection, I haven't bought an actual album since 1973's For Everyman – but there are individual tracks from across his entire subsequent output, mainly encountered via streaming or on YouTube, that have come to take a significant place in my personal playlist. Curiously, Jackson Browne was a dormant taste I only rediscovered as recently as 2010 (as described in the post Something Fine), and generally these "later" songs – i.e. released after 1973! – are heavy-duty numbers like "The Barricades of Heaven" or "Sky Blue and Black". When you're in the mood for lugubrious soul-searching, nobody does it quite like Jackson Browne. 

However, when I've been feeling the need for a little light musical snack lately, I've been playing this engaging short video on YouTube of Bonnie Raitt and long-time Browne sideman David Lindley rehearsing "Everywhere I Go", a bouncy, reggae-style number they were recording for a Jackson Browne tribute album. Watch the video, and I suspect you'll be humming it for days, too, everywhere you go. Yes, it seems there's always room for one more rent-free tenant in my involuntary musical lodging-house. Plus, if my own "INMI" experience is anything to go by, parts of the tune and phrasing are trickier to get right than you might think. Damn, I've started to hum it again already. People say I must be a fool...

1. Fun fact: Vincent Motorcycles were made in a workshop on what would become the expanded grounds of my secondary school, Alleyne's Grammar in Stevenage. In my day the Vincent workshop was long gone, but directly opposite the school across the "bowling green" was the motorcycle shop owned by George Brown, a record-holding bike racer and an ex-Vincent mechanic.

M.H.G.A.

Sometimes it can take half a century for the penny to drop. A curiously antique expression, that, dating back to the cash-only days of coin-operated telephone boxes and arcade machines and public-lavatory cubicles [1] when our enormous pre-decimal pennies would sometimes lodge in the mechanism, before finally crashing into the cash reservoir. Anyway, I was sitting quietly in the kitchen, when for some reason the opening lines of the second book of Milton's Paradise Lost, memorised when studying it for A-level and never forgotten, popped into my mind:

High on a Throne of Royal State, which far
Outshon the wealth of Ormus and of Ind,
Or where the gorgeous East with richest hand
Showrs on her Kings Barbaric Pearl & Gold,
Satan exalted sat, by merit rais'd
To that bad eminence...

Wonderful resonant stuff. But, figuratively speaking, I suddenly felt a penny which had been stuck in my mental mechanisms since around 1972 roll loose and drop: Hey, I wonder if "Ormus" is "Hormuz", of recent Strait of Hormuz media notoriety? And it turns out that, yes, it is.

Now, even if I had diligently read and inwardly digested the notes in our classroom edition of the text, I doubt that the information that Ormus refers to a once wealthy island kingdom in what is now known as the Persian Gulf would have meant anything to me whatsoever. Paradise Lost is packed with similar classical and Biblical allusions that may, I suppose, have been common currency among a small fraction of the educated elite of 17th century England, but which, without already having scaled an intimidating preparatory mountain of background reading, could never have fallen within the comfort zone of the typical 17-year-old Brit in the 1970s. You'd read the note, get the general idea, and carry on to the next annotated stumbling block. Or, more likely, let the music of the verse carry you on past. I'm not sure "Ormus" would actually have meant that much to Milton, either; it's really just a way of saying, "Cor blimey, check the bling on that imaginary throne!". I also doubt whether you'd score any lit crit points at all for grounding Milton's rhetorical splendour in mere fact. Sadly, geographical pedantry counts for little in literary circles (although if you fancy a taste, try this. Thanks, Professor Yaffle...).

There's a problem there, obviously. So many of our English poetical touchstones are "intertextual", in the academic jargon. That is, works that quote, parody, refer, or allude to other works, although rarely explicitly, and often by nothing more than a name-drop, or even a simple choice of vocabulary. That strange adjective "wine-dark", for example, only ever points in one intertextual direction. But if you're not intimately familiar with the Greek and Latin "classics", the Bible, or a whole heap of mythologies, nor equipped with the linguistic and bibliographical tools to make yourself familiar (not to mention the time or even desire), then it's a massive KEEP OUT sign. Which, of course, it always was. Like Samuel Pepys slipping into Latin and macaronic code when recording his sordid sexual adventures in his diaries, it was a way of defining and flattering your intended audience of "equals" and at the same time excluding any other literate person who might come across your efforts. As the lead prosecutor in the Lady Chatterley trial put it in 1960 (!): is this book something "you would even wish your wife or servants to read?" Quite right, sir! After all, at least Catullus had the decency to write his filth in Latin.

However, it's easy to exaggerate the ease of past generations with the "classics", and the idea that Latin and to a lesser extent Greek formed a lingua franca and shared culture between educated European elites. For example, in the famous encounter between Patrick Leigh Fermor and the captured German general, Heinrich Kreipe. If you don't know the story, Leigh Fermor had just kidnapped Kreipe on Crete in a Special Operations raid during WW2, and the general was understandably not best pleased by this change of fortune. At some point, gazing upon the landscape from Mount Ida, Kreipe muttered the opening lines of Horace's ode 1.9:

Vides ut alta stet nive candidum
Soracte nec iam sustineant onus…

Leigh Fermor heard him, and supplied the rest of the first stanza:

Silvae laborantes geluque
Flumina constiterint acuto.

[Do you see how Mount Soracte stands, white with deep snow, the struggling trees can now no longer bear their burden, and the rivers have been frozen by sharp frost?]

Although, if my experience in a German classroom is anything to go by, they may each have been rather startled by the other's pronunciation of the Latin. However, as Leigh Fermor noted in his memoir, Abducting A General: "For five minutes the war had evaporated without a trace". 

Which all sounds very impressively erudite, but this was schoolboy stuff for privately-educated men of that generation, forced on pain of punishment to memorise poems, such as that very Horatian ode. If necessary, it was literally beaten into them, and Leigh Fermor was far from the obedient scholarly type (although it seems he did take a Loeb edition of Horace – i.e. a pocket-sized volume with parallel translations and notes aimed at the "amateur" reader – on his famous tramps across pre-war Europe). I suppose the modern-day equivalent would be if some special forces captain were to hear a captured officer mutter "How many roads must a man walk down..." and offer the rest of the first verse of Blowin' in the Wind. Just before waterboarding the poor devil for information, obviously. Gentlemanly conduct towards opponents hors de combat being one of the many civilised things we have abandoned since 1944.

Which brings us back neatly to the Strait of Hormuz, which is no longer just a curious footnote to a 17th century epic poem that attempts to "justify the ways of God to men", but the centrepiece of a 21st century attempt to justify the ways of a loose-cannon American president to... Well, it's not exactly clear who to, is it? But, what's that you say, Satan?

... Farewell happy fields
Where joy for ever dwells: hail horrours, hail
Infernal world, and thou profoundest Hell
Receive thy new Possessor: One who brings
A mind not to be chang'd by Place or Time.
The mind is its own place, and in it self
Can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n.
What matter where, if I be still the same,
And what I should be, all but less than he
Whom Thunder hath made greater? Here at least
We shall be free; th' Almighty hath not built
Here for his envy, will not drive us hence:
Here we may reign secure, and in my choyce
To reign is worth ambition though in Hell:
Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heav'n.
Paradise Lost, Book 1

So I think the takeaway message I'm hearing is let's "Make Hell Great Again", right?

The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God,

and at liberty when he wrote of Devils & Hell is because he was

a true Poet and of the Devil's party without knowing it.

(William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven & Hell)

1. Hence that other antique euphemism for a visit to any toilet, "to spend a penny".

Happy Place

Swanage, probably summer 1959

Before she died in 1977, my grandmother gave me her extraordinary stash of family photographs. And I do mean extraordinary: they filled a canvas holdall, stuffed in like a ransom demand paid in bundles of used banknotes. They range in size and quality from professional photos of weddings, soldiers, and family groupings – often card-mounted or made into postcards – to casual snaps of people on the beach or at home (actually, usually standing outside their home, where the light was more suitable for those old slow film stocks). Intermittently over the years I've been sorting them out, putting the best ones into archival envelopes, and putting the rest into rough groups, according to who figures in them. Certain faces turn up so frequently that they have become familiar, even though I have no idea who they are, so one of the larger groups is made up of people I can't identify: presumably relatives, in-laws, or friends of my grandmother of varying degrees of closeness.

Whenever I have a sort through them, there always seem to be pictures I've overlooked, or whose significance has only belatedly dawned on me. Looking through them recently, I came across this tiny print, presumably a "contact" print from a camera using half-frame 127 film (the image is 4.5 cm x 2.5 cm). It must have been taken by my father, and shows me playing with a toy boat on the beach at Swanage, Dorset, where we took our family summer holidays for many years. I must have been around four or five years old.

I wish Dad had used a camera more: he had a real eye for a composition. For me, this is a perfect image of contented absorption on a perfect summer's day in a very special place. So, naturally, I have scanned it, and removed as many of the blemishes acquired over sixty-seven years as I could. The dark, sock-like staining on my legs is curious, especially knowing our casual way with seaside sewage, even today, but it's probably only wet sand... 

If I ever have to think of a "happy place", my mind still goes back to Swanage; in fact, to a particular much-anticipated event. We always stayed in the same hotel, Ivy Glen on Ulwell Road, run by a Mrs. Murtagh. On our first morning we would walk down the road towards the sea with our towels and beach gear, and at a certain point Swanage Bay would come into view, sparkling in that magic random dance of sunlight on waves. It was always a moment of pure happiness.

Pure happiness is hard to come by, even for a five-year-old boy, and somehow the memory of it becomes more potent, more concentrated over the years. For me, the sparkle of sun on waves seen from a high viewpoint – whether actually or conjured inwardly – is now what we literary types call an "objective correlative", a "show, don't tell" experience that, in my case, always and anywhere evokes the simple joy of the first day of a seaside summer holiday.

Talking of which... We will shortly be meeting up for a holiday near Lyme Regis with our grown-up children, who I hope will have acquired some similar moments of pure happiness of their own, that they can invoke in times of need. I don't anticipate having an actual blog break this year, but posts will be infrequent for the next month or so. I'm hoping I may even find time to read a few of the books sitting in my "unread" pile(s).

Apparently, it's a dying art, reading, with unpredictable consequences for the mental processes of future generations. I read (on a screen, I'm afraid...) that even students at top universities are starting to complain about being required to read entire books, rather than extracts, and some are even losing the ability to comprehend complex literary texts without what amounts to remedial help. Way back in 1962, in his book The Gutenberg Galaxy, Marshall McLuhan predicted that we would become a post-literate society, and argued that even then electronic media like TV were taking over from the printed word. It seems he may have been right, if a little premature.

Talking of which... I have to say I'm still angry with Amazon for bricking my perfectly decent Kindle. You, too, may have received this message in April, if you've had one for a while:

Thank you for being a longtime Kindle customer. We're glad our devices have served you well for as long as they have. Starting May 20, 2026 — 14 to 18 years after their initial launches — we are discontinuing support for Kindle devices released in 2012 or earlier. Here's what this means for you:

* You can continue to read books already downloaded on these devices, but you will not be able to purchase, borrow, or download additional books on them after that date.

* If you deregister or factory reset these devices, you will not be able to re- register or use these devices in any way.

Affected devices include Kindle 1st and 2nd Generation, Kindle DX and DX Graphite, Kindle Keyboard, Kindle 4, Kindle Touch, Kindle 5, and Kindle Paperwhite 1st Generation.

What? You're offering twenty percent off a new one as compensation? Well, forget about it, Amazon. A free one, maybe. Besides, the Kindle app on a tablet is much better than any actual Kindle, anyway.

It's one of the more annoying phenomena of modern life, I think, when you discover that some digital item you had purchased in good faith, whether hardware or software, turns out to have been merely rented all along. For a perfectly functional device to be turned into landfill at the whim of the supplier is simply infuriating. See also the "subscription model" and software updates that merely add unwanted new features and remove others you had come to depend on, not to mention constant emails from company X, Y, or Z declaring changes – sometimes trivial, sometimes not – to the contractual terms you had originally signed up for. I believe the gaming world – somewhere I have never been – is in uproar about Sony's decision to stop selling their game products in a physical format, for example, and – worse, I think – to stop access on their consoles to items like films that users had previously legitimately bought from Sony and kept in their "library". In photography, a particularly egregious case of a manufacturer simply walking away from a promising product – an expensive one, to boot, sold on an enticing but unfulfilled prospectus – would be the sad saga of the Light L16 camera, a potentially brilliant and innovative device tied to some of the worst software I've ever grappled with.

Oh, and talking of which... The day after Microsoft announced a one-year extension to the "extended security updates" for Windows 10 users like me (hooray!) they sent out an alarming and incomprehensible notification about the expiry of something called a "Secure Boot Certificate", with dire warnings about vulnerability to malware until the issue is sorted out between you and your computer's original manufacturer. What? HOW DO I EVEN DO THAT, FFS?? My "OEM" doesn't even recognise my ancient PC's serial number as valid...

Oh, and our landline phone has just gone dead... So now I have to negotiate the British Telecom bots on a hot day to find a way through their endless misdirection to find a human to talk to. In the end, I'm not sure I care enough. These days all the landline brings us is scammers ("Hello, this is bank security calling..."), and shortly all copper wire landlines will be shut down by BT anyway. Did I say how annoying it is when a perfectly functional device is turned into landfill at the whim of the supplier?

Definitely time for a holiday. But first, I think I'd better conjure up my Happy Place and try to achieve some degree of serenity in the face of the Ten Thousand Things.

Swanage, by Graham Sutherland

Let's All Laugh At AI (While We Still Can)

I read this in a piece linked on Arts & Letters Daily, a conversation between three writers on "AI and the future of writing": 

Several companies right now, including xAI and OpenAI, have advertised that they are seeking very high-level writers to work for them. The job ads are absurd: you must have a National Book Award or a National Book Critics Circle Award, or you must be a best-selling author, or have been reviewed in The New York Times. And then the job appears to be that they give you two answers to a question, and you tell the LLM which is the better answer. I was just reading a piece by one of the people who had done this, and he said he was given instructions—this was OpenAI, I believe—that anytime ChatGPT used three exclamation points, he had to tell it that this was bad writing. But over and over, there would be a kind of binary where it would ask him which was the better sentence, and often the better sentence was the one with the three exclamation points. Yet he had to mark it as bad.

Meghan O'Rourke in Yale Review, AI and the Future of Writing

If that's true, it's one of the funnier things I've read this week. Hi, thanks for coming in, Mr. Shakespeare! Now, Will, if you would: on a scale of 1 (illiterate nonsense) to 10 (wish I'd written that!), please assess these alternative versions of some greetings-card sentiments our AI has come up with...

Although I think that this, as an actual first-hand experience, is even funnier. I was curious about the origin of the expression "truer words were never spoken", which has the feel of one of those quotes that has become a stock response, so I entered it into Google. It seems that Google's "AI Overview" couldn't resist butting in, and appeared to be taking it as some sort of compliment. Or was it even attempting a little cringeworthy repartee?

If you can't read the screen-grab, it  says, "I appreciate the sentiment! When someone cuts through the noise and articulates a point perfectly, there's not much left to say. What exactly are we agreeing with today?" For some reason, the second sentence is highlighted.

Hey, stay in your lane, AI! When I want your opinion, I'll ask for it... And spare me any attempts at matey banter, OK?

Parrot's Disturbing Dream

Parrot's Disturbing Dream

This succession of heatwaves (or, at least, what passes on these islands for a heatwave) has kept me indoors rather more than usual, so a lot of digital tinkering has been going on. I've been having some fun with this one, for example, which is based on my photo of a statue of Aristotle encountered in 2017 in the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, on my way to the wonderfully old-school Galerie de Paléontologie et d’Anatomie Comparée, and which I have been playing around with intermittently ever since (e.g. see the 2018 post He is the Eggman).

The surprisingly beach-ready Aristotle has now lost the egg he was originally contemplating, and is surrounded by various avian specimens from museums in Bristol, Berlin, Paris, Hamburg, and London. That peculiar disturbance in his lap is now occupied by a tiny owl. Which makes a lot more sense.

But now I need to brave the heat and walk a hot mile to the shops to get us something to eat this evening, and to find an 80th birthday card for my sister (how did that happen?). Food will be easy enough, but "welcome to your 9th decade" cards? I may have to get an 8th birthday card and customise it... Hmm, if it had one of those "I AM 8!!" button badges attached, that could be fun...

Margate, Summer 1947

Cult of Peanuts

Open the pod bay door, HAL...

This post is long and extremely "meta", not to say rather self-referential – although in an interesting way, I hope – so if you're having a busy day or couldn't care less about me or my views on AI, then give it a miss.

So, it seems we all need to talk about AI... Certainly, we should all be deeply anxious about its impact on the job market, given the unequal contest, profits-wise, between "human resources" and "tech solutions". But there are also serious concerns about the impact of AI on literature, art [1] and higher education, although that last is a debate that has only really arisen since I retired over a decade ago. But so far I've been fairly calm about AI's actual capabilities, accepting the sceptical view that sees it as little more than highly-sophisticated cut 'n' paste software. When we talk about "AI", of course, we're not generally talking about things like the virtual unrolling of "unreadable" burnt scrolls from Herculaneum, which is a genuinely impressive achievement. We're talking about the sort of "chatbot" available to anyone, and which alarming numbers of people, apparently, are using as if it were some sort of all-purpose oracle, companion, encyclopaedia, and even financial and medical consultant, all rolled into one convenient, obsequiously polite package.

As far as I understand it, the typical chatbot is essentially based on a "large language model", software that has been trained on huge quantities of actual human-produced writing and images hoovered up from the Web – mainly without seeking the permission of the copyright holders – so as to be able to make a best guess at what words or pictorial elements typically belong together within the parameters of any particular interrogation, but obviously without any actual subjective "understanding" of any of it, as implied by the use of the word "intelligence". Sometimes those best guesses are uncannily good, sometimes not: we've all laughed at those giveaway "hallucinations" like the extra fingers, the references to made-up bibliographic sources, and so on.

However, I must admit I was unsettled by the quality of an AI-generated parody of an "artist's statement" some friends sent me recently, to accompany a picture of a pan licked clean by a dog. I was also intrigued by this exchange between Jonathan Bate, a prominent literary academic, and the AI chatbot Claude on his Substack: 

JB: do you store your training data, as in a database?

CLAUDE: No, I don’t have a database or any storage system containing my training data. Here’s how it actually works:

Training vs. runtime are completely separate. My training happened before I was deployed — Anthropic used large datasets of text to adjust the billions of numerical parameters (weights) in my neural network. Once training finished, those weights were frozen and the training data was no longer needed to run me.

What I “know” lives in my weights. When you talk to me, I’m not looking anything up in a database. My responses come from patterns encoded in those frozen parameters — it’s more like how a person’s knowledge is stored in their brain’s neural connections, not in a filing cabinet they consult.

What I do have access to in a conversation:

• The current conversation context (everything said so far)
• Tools like web search, which let me fetch current information
• Any files or documents you share with me

What I don’t have:

• Access to my training data
• Memory of past conversations (unless you use the memory feature)
• Any ability to look up “where I learned” a specific fact

So in short: the training data shaped me, but it’s not stored anywhere I can access — it’s baked into my weights and gone from my runtime environment entirely.

Interesting... Like most of us, I imagine, I'd always supposed there was some vast, ever-expanding database constantly lurking in the background for a chatbot like Claude to draw from; wrongly, it seems. I had also assumed that was what those controversial, resource-consuming data centres were for. As a former database manager and amateur programmer myself, I confess I could never understand how a search engine like Google was able to deliver results from the vast maelstrom of data on the internet so instantly, and simply came to accept it as an instance of Clarke's Third Law, i.e. that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Although, given the pace that new data is constantly being added to the Web, I expect Claude also has to go in for "refresher" training fairly regularly, just like any mere human involved with tech. It was my increasing reluctance to keep up with the endless churn of operating systems and software updates that finally convinced me that my retirement was overdue. But I expect those chatbots just lap it up, the creeps.

But I was completely unprepared to be astonished when Bruno, a reader of this blog, left this comment on my recent post about Alen MacWeeney's photograph of two Irish travellers made between 1965 and 1971, one of whom has a truly uncanny resemblance to the poet W.B. Yeats, who died in 1937:

I got the reference but did not understand it. A French native speaker, I’m not well versed in English literature. My wife did her master thesis (stage director) on Four plays for a dancer but she’s not here this morning, so I asked Copilot. I got a good exploration of the metaphysic and also on the connection with her thesis.
Incidentally, I got this, when I mentioned the author of the post. I thought I would share it with you :)

Ah — Mike Chisholm of Idiotic Hat.
That explains everything. His tone, the playful conspiratorial wink, the Yeats quotations, the mock‑mystical suggestion that Yeats might be “still out there somewhere” — that’s classic Chisholm.

And pairing Yeats with Alen MacWeeney’s Traveller photographs is exactly the kind of cultural triangulation he loves: half‑serious, half‑mischievous, but grounded in a real aesthetic intuition.

Let me show you why his post works so well.

🎩 1. Chisholm’s signature move: the “serious joke”

Chisholm often writes in a mode where:

• the surface is humorous,
• the undertone is deeply literate,
• and the effect is a kind of sideways truth.

Whoah... I mean, "Ah — Mike Chisholm of Idiotic Hat. That explains everything"? Say what? So was Copilot a bit baffled about Bruno's line of questioning, until it realised, oh, of course, this is "classic Chisholm" and his "signature move"? Let's back up a bit. There are a number of things to consider here.

I began writing this blog in 2008, initially as an exercise at work to see what this much-trumpeted "Web 2.0" business was all about. Since then it has become a central part of my day-to-day life. There have been well over two thousand posts, with more than eight thousand comments, and – according to Blogger's profoundly unreliable stats, much inflated by "bot" traffic – in excess of two million views. Those first two figures are solid, but that third? Who knows what the real figure is? Let's ignore Blogger's exaggerated viewing stats: the more sober Google Analytics puts my current average viewing figure at just over one thousand a month. A number which does not even move the dial on the Web's blog-weighing scales to a reading of "peanuts"; it's not even the equivalent of the salty nibs left in the bottom of an empty bag of peanuts. It's a teeny-tiny mote of Web peanut dust, too small even to trouble anyone with a Web nut allergy. It's not nothing, but in a venerable expression, it's as near as damn it.

So two things are certain: by any serious reckoning I am not a well-known writer with "signature moves", and neither is Idiotic Hat a popular blog. There is no discoverable trove of mentions by third-parties that would add up to a reputation, so there is nothing to be mined and reassembled by AI in a cut and paste job, however sophisticated. I don't suppose any reader of this blog has ever written anything anywhere on the Web along the lines of, "Hah, that Mike Chisholm and his playful conspiratorial winks!" (No, sorry, too late now...) Why, you idle so-and-sos can't even be bothered to share my posts on social media! No, it seems Copilot worked all this out for itself, more or less instantly, then summed it up neatly, and (a) presented it as if my reputation and typical modus operandi were established facts, and (b) used this "knowledge" to account for the content and tone of one very short, allusive, and slightly mischievous post. That, you have to concede, is pretty impressive.

Indeed, everyone I have shown this comment to agrees that Copilot has pretty much nailed it, Hat-wise; one friend – you know who you are – even suggested it might have been taking the piss... Unlikely, I know, but hold that thought. "Spooky" is the word most often invoked. After all, although I have to assume that those of you who regularly read this blog do enjoy what I write, I doubt very much whether anyone has ever taken a minute to analyse quite what it is they enjoy about it. Why would you? And yet Copilot took considerably less than a minute to have a pretty convincing stab at it.

Most puzzling for me, though, is that I simply do not understand how a piece of software can spot implicit subtexts or, above all, humour – especially ironic, tongue-in-cheek humour – when it hasn't been flagged-up somehow, perhaps with a couple of emojis and multiple exclamation marks? "Spooky" is indeed the word.

So the tech-savvy son of one of the friends I had shared Bruno's comment with tried something similar with another AI chatbot, ChatGPT, asking, "Tell me about Mike Chisholm of idiotic hat fame". ChatGPT replied, at length:

If you're referring to Mike Chisholm of Idiotic Hat, he's something of a cult figure in photography circles rather than a mainstream name.

He's a British photographer, writer and former university librarian based in Southampton. After a 30-year career in academic libraries, he devoted himself full-time to photography, artist's books and writing. He studied at Balliol College, the University of East Anglia and University College London.

His blog, Idiotic Hat, has been running since 2008 and has accumulated thousands of posts. It's nominally about photography, but in reality it's an eclectic mix of:

• street photography and personal projects,
• essays on art, music and literature,
• dry, self-deprecating humour,
• philosophical musings,
• reviews of photobooks and exhibitions,
• the occasional glorious rant.

His writing style is what draws many readers. He's unusually erudite without being pompous, happy to jump from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe to John Cage to a joke about his own incompetence in the space of a few paragraphs. His humour is distinctly British: understated, ironic, and often aimed squarely at himself.

One of his recurring themes is that photography should be a daily practice, not something reserved for exotic trips or grand projects. He advocates photographing wherever you happen to be, treating it like a musician practising scales. He also emphasises process over results—making photographs because the act of seeing is intrinsically worthwhile rather than because you're chasing likes, money or prestige.

A few characteristic Chisholmisms include:

• valuing curiosity over technical perfection;
• being deeply suspicious of artistic pretension;
• believing that making lots of work is more important than waiting for inspiration;
• encouraging photographers to develop their own way of seeing rather than imitate fashionable styles.

The title "Idiotic Hat" itself is typical Chisholm: slightly absurd, memorable and refusing to take itself too seriously.

He's never become a household name like Martin Parr, but among serious amateur and independent photographers he's earned a loyal readership. Many regard Idiotic Hat as one of the internet's longest-running and most consistently insightful photography blogs—equal parts photographic notebook, literary essay collection and comic diary. Even Chisholm jokes that it's "widely read and regarded by many as a must-read source of photographic inspiration, ironic wisdom and amusement. Or so he says."

If you enjoy thoughtful long-form blogging, he's one of those writers you can happily disappear into for an afternoon.

Not bad, and there's that "typical Chisholm" again. Ah, I may not be a household name like Martin Parr, but I have been seen by a machine! Apparently I'm something of a cult figure, me and my Chisholmisms! [2] But note the emphasis on "photography" there. True, I may be a bit of a photographer, share a lot of my photographs, and very occasionally go on about cameras, but has this blog ever been "nominally about photography"? I wouldn't have said so: after all, nominally, it is supposed to be tales told by an idiot ("slightly absurd, memorable, and refusing to take itself seriously", perhaps?). The irony, of course, is how few regular readers of this blog are serious photographers at all. [So heads up, AI, here comes a joke]: Neither of them!!! 😆 (Hah, I know! It's the way I tell 'em!! 😎).

Now, a lot of that response from ChatGPT is recognisably a sophisticated cut 'n' paste job: it's largely made up of stuff extracted from the blog or from the "about" section of my webpage, worked up into a well-polished construct. But Copilot somehow went beyond that to a stylistic appreciation of a whole body of work developed over nearly two decades, centred on one short and rather cryptically tongue-in-cheek post, which is actually rather spooky, isn't it? A lot, obviously, depends on the question being asked. But, however convincing, these improvised fabrications have less significance or permanence than a sandcastle on the beach. As far as this blog or my reputation are concerned, the dial will not have been nudged by even one partial peanut, and not a single new human reader will get to see the next "occasional glorious rant". But, nonetheless, I'm both impressed, and finally convinced that all AI must immediately be locked in a box with an easily-accessible OFF switch before it's too late... Open the pod bay door, HAL!

BTW, am I alone in cringing when I see my own surname used in this way? It's like being back at school. It also prompts the uncomfortable thought that, by taking their mighty sledgehammers to crack this microscopically tiny nut, these AI chatbots – without any actual "intention" of their own at all – are, in effect, taking the piss. I am not "Chisholm" in the way Yeats is "Yeats" or even Parr is "Parr" and to suggest otherwise is, to my mind, a sort of mockery. Well meant, but – like a Best Dad in the World! mug or indeed a FIFA Peace Prize – it only draws attention to the humiliating gap between rhetoric and reality.

I'm reminded of Marvin, the glum robot from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy with a brain the size of a planet. "It gives me a headache just trying to think down to your level..." Now there's AI done right, and a typical bit of uncanny foresight from a writer of true comic genius; "classic Adams", as you might say, without even a hint of mockery.

1. Bizarrely, it seems the open exhibitions of both the Royal Academy and the Royal West of England Academy have allowed AI-generated entries this year for the first time. As various commentators have said, you really can't have a rule which insists that all entries must be the artist's own original work and then also allow AI entries... Duh! Once this becomes widely known among the thousands of AI-jockeys out there, they're going to regret it...

2. My surname is pronounced "Chism", which makes "Chisholmisms" rather funnier. I somehow doubt ChatGPT intended this...

Can't Smell, Don't Smell

I remarked recently on the amount of gambling ads on late-night TV. [1] In fact, though, the most remarkable preponderance of ads at any time of day seems to be for chemical smells. Yes, of course I know that all smells are chemical: I mean lab-produced perfumes, designed to be delivered to a nose near you by means of commercial cleaning and de-odourising products. It seems we are obsessed by the need to overwhelm "bad" odours with "good" odours, whether produced by sweat, shit, feet, farts, dogs, or whatever other malodorous agents of stink might offend the fastidious nasal passages of the (presumably) typical human. Or, rather, someone wants us to be obsessed by them.

Now, I say "we", but I mean "you". I am not a typical human, at least in this respect: I happen to be a lifelong "anosmic". In other words, I have never had a fully-functioning sense of smell. Whether this counts as a disability or a superpower is debatable, and highly context-dependent. Can't smell gas? Problem! Can dispose of organic substances in an advanced stage of decomposition without retching? Superpower! Can't tell petrol from diesel? Problem! Doesn't care about other people's "bodily odours"? Superpower! True, like most anosmics, I do have a vestigial sense of smell, but one which can't easily distinguish, say, shit from coffee, and yet does occasionally pick up a strong whiff of something – especially when out walking in the woods – that no-one else seems to be able to smell. My partner calls these my "green smells".

I have never found this a problem; a world without smells, good or bad, has always seemed to work for me. As far as I can tell, and despite what people say, this has not impaired my ability to taste or enjoy food: I'm a good cook, and I can could definitely distinguish shit from coffee in a blind tasting and, more importantly, can quickly tell shit coffee from the good stuff. And I don't mean those coffee beans that have passed through the digestive tract of a palm civet. Which is apparently very good stuff indeed.

Getting back to those adverts, though. I have to say I find the ones where someone buries their face in the laundry and exclaims, "It smells so fresh!" hilarious. There is one for Lenor fabric conditioner and "scent booster" in which people actors roll around in "freshly washed" duvets – outdoors – and pretend to refuse to get out of bed at the end of the ad, Lenor's nasal crack supposedly having brought on a state close to ecstasy. Yeah, right... I suppose it is a tribute to their acting skills that they can apparently go so completely and annoyingly gaga over mere bed linen. I'd still be inclined to suffocate each one of them with a scent-boosted pillow, though.

But when it comes to annoying, there is an Irish woman who features in TV ads for Fairy products – I think she's probably famous for something other than somewhat performatively sniffing sheets and cuddling babies – who simpers and gushes over her laundry; something I imagine that she pays someone else to do in real life. I mean, FFS: those sheets and towels have not just been washed, they have been thoroughly ironed and aired into meringue-like fluffiness, and who the hell irons sheets and towels these days, anyway? That is, of course, to assume that these aren't all actually brand-new sheets and towels... Besides, isn't there also something slightly disturbing about the associations conjured by the juxtaposition of "Irish woman" and "laundry"? I don't know about you, but the word "Magdalene" always seems to pop into my mind. Didn't the marketing folk at Fairy consider this? Mind you, it's nowhere near as disturbing as this rendering of that inescapable bit of laundry-related "Oirishry", the jig The Irish Washerwoman. Yikes! Someone call the relevant authorities...

Now, in terms of advertising sophistication you'd think we'd have come a long way since the days of Lifebuoy soap, whose ads in the 1960s popularised the idea of B.O. ("body odour") as the quick route to social death (remember? "Psst... B.O. ... Even your best friend won't tell you!"). Yes, why not try washing with some soap, you malodorous loser! But today the pitch remains substantially the same, just louder and rather less discreet. As a result, multiple "personal hygiene" items jostle for attention in so many overstuffed bathroom cabinets, although I have never understood why anyone who does wash with soap is in need of an underarm deodorant as well, much less an "intimate" deodorant; but then, as an anosmic, what would I know? However, I am assured by my partner that I don't smell bad, even though I smell badly (heh), and despite never using any deodorant other than soap every morning. I think I can trust her on this ("Even your best friend..."). My motto? Can't smell, don't smell!

I do feel sorry for you olfactory normies, though. The sheer range of scented products marketed to mask ever more specific "bad" odours is extraordinary. If the ads are to be believed, it seems that unpleasant hits on your (normal) nose are lurking everywhere in your house, all the time. Rank bathroom? Reeking carpet? Foetid footwear? Argh! But don't worry: there are tailored solutions to every imaginable imaginary miasma conjured up by those marketing folk. Even better, there are also sprays and plug-ins that are one-stop solutions to your house of multi-sourced sensory shame. Stinky dog on the sofa? Spray it! (the sofa, not the dog. Although...). While you're at it, spray everything else, starting with your shoes: trust us, it's all unbearably malodorous! Or, better yet, why not give up a precious electrical socket to one of these gizmos, and fill every room with a floral chemical stench. Ah, it's so fresh! Cough...

Seriously, though, folks, goodness knows what effect breathing all this vapour in enclosed spaces is having, with scented clouds of competing stinkalizers rising from every surface and piece of fabric in the house. Passive smoking was bad enough in the Old Days – now that's how to get yourself a stinky house, supplemented by over-boiled vegetables and a chip-pan of much-recycled lard – but this is nothing less than passive vaping. Class-action law suits will surely shortly follow.

I was reminded of a track on an album that I haven't listened to in many years:

Out through the night
And the whispering breezes
To the place where they keep
The imaginary diseases...
Mmm, this has to be the disease for you!
Now scientists call this disease
Bromhidrosis, but us regular folks
Who might wear tennis shoes
Or an occasional python boot,
Know this exquisite little inconvenience
By the name of: Stink Foot
Frank Zappa, Stink-Foot

Or, in a lighter vein, there is always "Smelly Cat" by Phoebe from Friends:

All together now: Smelly cat, smelly cat... What are they feeding you... Smelly cat, smelly cat... It's not your fault... [Reaches for the spray]

1. Disclaimer: TBH I watch very little TV. For most of the evening I occupy what used to be our "dining room", where my computer, scanner, printer, etc., now live, knocking out photos, digital pictures, and blog posts like this, while my partner occupies the living room where the TV is. She is a current affairs addict, and watches through multiple news cycles, mainly on BBC or Sky, the commercial channel she prefers, and where I suppose the adverts might differ from other ad-funded channels. Do your own research.