Reading Writing

I recently met up with an old friend – a house-mate and partner in crime from my university days – to see the Kiefer / Van Gogh exhibition at the Royal Academy. Although, to be honest, in these early days of my eighth decade, I'm more and more regarding such gallery-going as an occasion for a catch-up chat over coffee with old friends in a mutually convenient and congenial environment: I've got another one coming up in a couple of weeks at the National Gallery. The actual exhibitions are great, of course, but a bit of face-time with old friends (friend-time with old faces?) is what makes a trip to London worth the effort and expense. In fact, a couple of times the conversation has been of such intensity / profundity / hilarity that we've actually skipped the show, and just bought more coffee.

Anyway, this particular friend is one of those admirable people who have continued to top up their cultural capital, way beyond those early years when deposits into the culture bank seemed to offer some kind of advantage in the material world, even if only to add lustre to one's small talk. No seriously ambitious person wants to be wrong-footed when the conversation turns to, say, Schubert or Seinfeld. But the payments most people make into their cultural investment schemes seem to fall off rapidly as the immediate worldly benefits decline. After all, if your ambitious life-plan has worked out well for you, then you're now the one leading the small talk, and if what you really want to go on about is house prices or comparative EV mileages, then so be it. Fuck Schubert.

This continuing cultural investment is something I and my friends tend to have in common, naturally. Not everyone would choose Anselm Kiefer's grandiose exorcisms of the guilt of Nazi Germany as a suitable venue for a little Kaffeeklatsch, I'm sure. But we – and, I trust, you – have simply never felt like cashing out, culturally. Unlike me, this old friend did not study literature at university but, perhaps for that very reason, has persisted in the view that the Great Books are not just something you read for examination purposes. So, as a committed, lifelong reader of the Serious Stuff, he has always been keen to share his latest literary adventures with me; I am supposed to be a credentialled littérateur, after all.

However, this time I had finally to admit that, to put it bluntly, I really don't read much self-declared or critically-endorsed "literary" fiction any more. I could tell from his reaction that this was as if I had said that, all things considered, that Farage bloke is talking a lot of sense. But it's true. I do still read, obviously – I'm currently reading Sally Mann's Art Work (isn't everyone?), and before that I was dipping in and out of various translations of Rilke's Duino Elegies – compare and contrast! – but, apart from light reading like the latest "Slow Horses" offering from Mick Herron, I can't actually remember the last serious novel I read.

Why not? Well, I never did read much fiction, even in my peak literary days – poetry was always much more my thing – but the simple fact is that my cultural interests have changed: I'm primarily a visual arts person these days. The vast majority of the (still too many) books I buy are photographic and art monographs (we never use the insulting term "coffee-table book" around here, and neither should you); books in which I mainly pore over the pictures, and barely skim the texts. In my own way I have also come to see myself as a very minor player in that scene; after all, I do make a lot of pictures, photograph obsessively, and occasionally exhibit and sell my work.

I did once try to see myself as a writer, it's true. I wrote and submitted some stories, poems, and even a couple of radio plays, none of which (thankfully) were ever published. I found it was tougher going than I'd anticipated, getting those words out of my head and onto paper, and about as rewarding as doing a nightly bout of school homework. Rather, it was the doodles and sketches I was making in the margins as I ground out the writing that came most easily and compellingly to me, and once I had allowed myself to acknowledge this, my creative output was unleashed. I could never have made a living as an artist – who does? – but I've had an awful lot of fun pretending to be one. In fact, I suspect that to be an "advanced amateur" is the key to happily unpressured participation in any cultural scene. [1]

But, on the subject of reading matter, do you find you need something to read when seated for a spell on the ceramic amplifier in the smallest studio, so to speak? Ideally, a durably-bound book that will open flat in your lap, can resist awkward, often single-handed handling, and which contains a large number of short, self-contained pieces of sparkling wit and insight, each consumable in a concentrated five to ten minutes? If so, my perfect toilet companion (my sede mecum?) for some while now has been a hardback copy of Geoff Dyer's See/Saw: Looking at Photographs. It's a collection of his analyses of about fifty individual photographs, from Atget to Mike Brodie via Luigi Ghirri; generally just three or four pages about each image, nicely reproduced on glossy paper (pretty much waterproof and wipe-clean, too), and written in a distinctly non-academic style, most of which pull off the trick of being both entertaining as well as deeply insightful into what makes a good photograph tick. Highly recommended, and far better than anything you'll find made and marketed as a dedicated "bathroom read" (although I will make an exception for Bill Duncan's The Wee Book of Calvin, of which more in another post). [2]

As it happens, my copy of See/Saw is signed, but on an adhesive insert stuck onto the title page, the book having been published in the plague year of 2021 and therefore, like most books which were "signed" during that strange interlude, never actually handled by the author. Which, given the situation at the time must have seemed appropriately prophylactic, but it really does look like shit, doesn't it?

1. Here I am writing this blog, for example: over 2,000 posts since 2008. But this is a lot of fun, too, and nothing like doing my homework. I enjoy the liberty of an advanced amateur; thinking globally (well, maybe), but writing locally. It would be very different, though, if I were asking for money in exchange – you wouldn't be bothering to read this, for a start – or if I found myself under pressure to deliver an entertaining weekly column in a national newspaper. I have immense respect and not a little envy for the likes of the Guardian's Marina Hyde or Tim Dowling, but would I want their job? No thanks!

2. If you don't know Geoff Dyer's work, he's something of an eccentric polymath, who has written regular fiction but has mainly produced a whole series of unclassifiable works of essayistic encounters with literature, art, photography and film, plus travel and autobiography, often with truly daft titles. I first came across him when I was at a conference in Dublin in 1995 and in a bookshop there saw a pile of remaindered copies of The Missing of the Somme. I bought one – WW1 has long been an interest of mine – and was immediately taken by Dyer's style and ability to take a sideways look at the war's legacy as memory, and as memorialisation. I've not read everything of his, but I'm a fan: in many ways (check his biography) he is the writer I once thought I might become.

New Words

I recently heard a handy word on the radio: wackaging. It's a new one on me, but perhaps not to you, as it's clearly been around for at least a decade, and was allegedly coined by Guardian journalist Rebecca Nicholson. It means:

"Wackaging" or wacky packaging, refers to the increasingly overly familiar, infantilised copy that’s become ubiquitous ever since Innocent adopted a wacky and distinctive tone of voice on their packaging in 2000.

It really is everywhere now, isn't it? An insistent mateyness coupled with a toe-curling cutesiness, as if some hipsterish cuddly toys had taken over the marketing and labelling of everything from biscuits to the toilet lids on South Western trains. No, really:

image: objective ingenuity

I have to read this silly babble every time I go up to London, and stand for a pee in front of it, swaying perilously in every direction as the train rocks and rolls over the rails. But, there, look, I've done it myself: "pee" is surely nothing more than baby talk for "piss", not forgetting its more malodorous cousin, "poo".

Baby talk or no, to openly declare your intention of going for a pee or a poo in most company would still come across as oddly "unfiltered", although to go full-on technical with talk of urination or defecation instead would be downright weird. Some things are eternally unmentionable, it seems, with the result that there have been many ways of politely expressing the need without being over-specific. Quite a few of these have disappeared: the need to "powder one's nose" (nothing to do with cocaine), or "spend a penny" (a reference to public-toilet cubicles that used to be coin-operated) and so on were all frequently-heard expressions in my childhood, readily understood, but now obsolete. Rather like that all-purpose brush-off, "Going to see a man about a dog" (as a response to the question, "Where are you going?"), which I also haven't heard for decades.

People have always tiptoed around the sensibilities of the innocent or the prudish, of course, but the rise of baby talk as polite talk seems a backwards step to me. This can get truly weird in the doctor's surgery. At some point, for example, the cutesy, infantile "tummy" seems to have become the normal word for "stomach". Is there really some sense in which "stomach", or even "belly", are inappropriate terms between adults? I suppose doctors will always have had a particular problem with what linguists call "register". They, of course, have a complete set of precise medical vocabulary which is often utterly incomprehensible to the typical patient, being based on an understanding of Latin and Greek. So compromises have always needed to be found, not least when referring to anything "down there" – problems with "the waterworks" and the like – but finding a suitable middle-ground can be tricky. [1] 

This is particularly the case when – as is so often the case in the NHS today – a medic's first language is not English. No matter how fluent, they will not have acquired the full set of appropriate euphemisms, or a native speaker's confidence in which are and which are not acceptable in polite company, so tend to fall back on the unambiguous trade-talk of med school. I was recently delighted to learn the word "flatus", for example, as a technical term for a fart, and was thoroughly confused when the same doctor, prodding what turned out to be a small umbilical hernia, pronounced that, yes, it did seem to be viscous, i.e. (in my non-medical vocabulary) "having a thick, sticky consistency between solid and liquid". Say what, doc? But the word he used was actually "viscus", i.e. innards of any description, for which there seems to be no baby-babble term. Tummy stuffing, maybe? This is unsurprising, I suppose, as our inner organs are rarely on display or the subject of non-specialist discussion, and when they are the circumstances are never particularly cosy. A little Latin can be a useful sedative.

Oh, stop it, Oatly...

To get back to wackaging, though. The desire and pursuit of cosiness is clearly one of its underlying motivations: advertising copy writers and packaging designers want us to associate warm feelings with a product. So if your image of Happy Times is to be curled up on a sofa cradling a cup of hot chocolate in your fleecy onesie – quite possibly accompanied by a talking cat – then I'm afraid to say that you have been wackaged. Or, worse, you may even be a cause of wackaging.

Some wackiness is de rigueur, too, obviously: there's no end of baffling, hallucinatory goings-on filling up the ad breaks. It's entertaining, sure, but can you figure out or remember from one break to the next what exactly was being advertised? Car insurance? Chocolate? LSD or ketamine, perhaps? Never has so much "creative" effort been lavished so profligately on so little (unless you take a very hard line on the religiosity of Renaissance art). But the more insidious motivation, I think, is the attempt to endow a product with a personality. Not just any personality, of course – coldly aloof, psychotically cruel, or pathetically needy wouldn't do – but something relatable, or – in another word currently in vogue, and not unconnected to the fashion for wackaging – adorable. Which is to say, like a particularly winsome toddler.

We could blame the Japanese for this, with their cult of cute, a.k.a. kawaii. But we've been doing this to ourselves forever without any foreign help, thank you very much. Or some of us have, anyway. The trouble starts when you take perfectly serviceable words and give them the infantilising makeover. I have always recoiled from any talk between consenting adults that involves emetically hypocoristic items like "choccy" (chocolate) or "biccies" (biscuits). I'm with Dorothy Parker here:

And it is that word "hummy," my darlings, that marks the first place in "The House at Pooh Corner" at which Tonstant Weader fwowed up.

(Parker's Constant Reader column, New Yorker, October 12, 1928)

True, to be repelled by soppiness in all its manifestations may be a side effect of the masculinisation process I and most boys underwent in the 1950s. I must have mentioned, for example, how my grandfather used to throw worms at me in the garden, having learned that I was afraid of them ("Only girls are afraid of worms!"). But you surely don't have to be some spartanised male to want to punch anyone who refers to Christmas as – argh! – "Crimble", or to their drooling, overweight lapdog as their "baby"?

So, I hope you, too, will feel able to resist these cynical attempts to turn the world into an episode of the Teletubbies. Just stop it, Oatly: you are not my adorably wacky bestie, you are a carton of oat milk. In fact, you are not a "you" at all, you are an "it"; please take a step back or I'll ... I'll buy something else, something with a little more dignity.

BTW, if "hypocoristic" isn't a new word to you, too, then congratulations (what, you didn't look it up?). I found it, used it, and will probably have forgotten it within a week... You're welcome.

Just fuck offibobble, EE...

1. Doctors themselves seem to have a problem with their more tongue-twisting medical vocabulary. Sadly, I notice that "ear, nose, and throat" (ENT) has almost completely ousted the wonderfully obscure "otorhinolaryngology" (ORL) as a medical speciality.

Nature Notes

Despite – because of? – several heat waves and unprecedented drought conditions over the summer, it has clearly been a bumper year for our local wildlife. Very local: I mean the critters that turn up in or near our tiny back garden in suburban Southampton, from the Roe Deer that peer over the wall that divides us from an adjacent cemetery as they munch on the rampant brambles to the many species of insect that buzz about and lurk among the shrubs on our steeply-sloping back bank.

Recently we have hosted raids from large rival gangs of tiny birds: young Willow Warblers and a mixed flock of Long-Tailed, Blue, and Great Tits. It can seem like there are dozens of them out there, as they flicker and  twitch frantically around the garden looking for snacks to fuel their absurdly overdriven metabolisms. Calm down, guys! Then there is the fox that regularly pads along the wall in broad daylight, and our most regular visitor of all, next door's cat, who seems to prefer our unruly wilderness as a contemplative space to their neatly-trimmed garden.

Some of our most welcome annual visitors are the day-flying Hummingbird Hawk-Moths, which – incredibly – will have migrated all the way from southern Europe. I always look forward to their arrival in our garden some time around mid-to-late August, and enjoy watching them as they hover and dart about the flowering shrubs looking just like little hummingbirds, their wings a blur of orange and brown. The ability of such frail creatures to make such dangerous voyages, including a Channel crossing, is astonishing, isn't it? I remember sitting in the university Staff Club one lunchtime, and watching a succession of Painted Lady butterflies fly past the window, each spaced out by twenty yards or so as if attached to some invisible cable, having completed a similar odyssey from deepest Europe. What on earth is the attraction? What ill-judged compulsion is buried deep in their genetic makeup? Like those poor devils making daily hazardous Channel crossings in inflatable rafts, what false promises have they been told about what lies in store for them here? Dammit, people, you were already in France. France! Yes, they're surly bastards, but the weather, the food... Why come here?

A few days ago I was amused to watch one of the young warblers attempting to take down a hawk moth. Both bird and moth are hyper-zippy, but speed is not everything and the moth has more tricks up its lepidopterous sleeve than the inexperienced bird. It was able to evade the warbler's rushes and lunges with its stabbing beak like Ip Man swerving the knife slashes of some triad thug. Eventually, however, the hassle was too much, the moth lost patience, and ejected from its rudely interrupted feeding session, zooming away up into the tree tops at warp speed, like a UFO disappearing off the radar screen. Gone!

Return of the Life-Hack Guru

It's September, we're heading into autumn, and look who's just turned up: it's our old friend the peripatetic Life-Hack Guru. We haven't seen him since 2014! He gets around: on an eleven-year cycle like the sun, it seems. So lay some of that hard-won wisdom on us, coach!

[The Life-Hack Guru clears his throat, somewhat ostentatiously, spits, and speaks]

OK, listen closely now, I'll only be saying this once, unless there are repeat fees.

So people often say to me, how is it that someone as plebeian, short, and plug-ugly as yourself has made it into a position of such eminence and enlightenment that you feel able to hand out advice to the likes of me, whose many advantages in life have, admittedly, taken me nowhere much? Please explain your secret of happiness and success, Life-Hack Guru!

Hmm, happiness and success... Tricky. Well, if I do have a secret, a large part of it is actually a list. Not one made by me, but some self-help bullet-points I found in a magazine that someone had left on the seat of a train one afternoon long ago in the past, back where all the best secrets are hidden. Although, in fact, my actual secret is that I found that I could disagree so violently with every item in this pathetic checklist of sententious twaddle that my philosophy of life evolved in opposition to it. That's proper dialectics, that is: accept no substitute.

So you might say I am here to deliver a kick in the listicles. As Bill Blake said to me one night: The tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction. At least, that's what I thought he said. It was a very noisy tavern.

Anyway, here we go: taking a leaf out of Bill's book, here is my new improved angelical-diabolical PowerPoint presentation. Lights down and first slide, please:

Angelic Proposition 1. Stop spending time with the wrong people. Avoid anyone who makes you unhappy, wastes your time, or holds you back. People who want to drag you down to their level are not your friends.

Demonic Refutation: Seek out the "wrong" people! They will enrich your life, and at the very least make you look good. Who needs dull friends?
 
AP 2. Stop lying to yourself. There's no need to pretend everything is OK if it isn’t. It's pointless to pursue goals you don't believe in, only to blame someone else for your subsequent failure.

DR: Self-deception is the royal road to the top. Who cares to the top of what or where? You can always pretend you meant to go there, should you ever get there. If not, then you will know who to blame!

AP 3. Don't ignore your own needs. In particular, don't pretend to be, or try to become someone you’re not, just to please someone else, or just to be liked.

DR: Isn't this just AP 2 worded differently? Do I really need to spell this out? Do you honestly think the secret of success in any field is "just be yourself"? You will be entitled to add some ridiculously self-centred "needs" in a rider to your contract when you reach the top (apparently Paul McCartney won't sit on leather seats), but meantime there are people to schmooze, gatekeepers to bribe, false friends to cultivate. For seriously ambitious wannabes "fake it to make it" is a profound teaching.

AP 4. Don't cling on to the past. In particular, stop beating yourself up over old mistakes. Get over it.

DR: Show me a successful person who does not obsess over their past mistakes, and I'll show you a complacent idiot with a trust fund. We learn from and are fuelled by shame and humiliation; don't jettison your personal rocket fuel. Grudges burn particularly well, too. Revenge is a dish best served hot, steaming, and from a great height.

AP 5. Don't be afraid to make mistakes. Avoid the urge to perfection. "The best is the enemy of the good".

DR: Look no further for an explanation of the wave of mediocrity that has overwhelmed us. "Good enough" is not good enough. Sure, make mistakes, but don't let them get into the final draft. May all your enemies and rivals be mediocrities content with "good enough"!

AP 6. Stop trying to buy happiness. The best things in life cannot be bought with money. Try investing some time instead.

DR: Oh, please... Invest as much time as you like in your Skoda, it will still be a Skoda. Try investing in a high-risk portfolio of stocks and shares instead. See the Parable of the Talents (Matthew 25: 14-30). It seems Jesus was pretty hard-nosed, when it came to the up-side of usury.

AP 7. Take care of the pennies. Notice and value the constant flow of small, ordinary things, otherwise one day you will realise – too late! – that that was all there was ever going to be.

DR: See AP 6. Nobody ever became rich, actually or metaphorically, by penny-pinching. Think big, or you will shrink to fit. The God of Small Things is a liar and a cheat, who will get you high and then steal your wallet while you gawp at the pattern in the carpet.

AP 8. Avoid self pity and complaint. It's tough all over. Nobody wants to know how hard it was for you to do what you did, especially if moaning about it has become your substitute for doing it.

DR: A good moan in bad company (see AP 1) is one of life's great pleasures. Why deny yourself?

AP 9. If at first you don't succeed, try doing it differently, but only slightly differently. To persist in a course of action hoping for a different outcome is not the definition of neurosis, it is the definition of persistence.

DR: Yet another way to bury us in unwanted gifts from untalented people. Give it a couple of radically different approaches, then give it up and try something else. Or better still, get back in the audience. Trust John Keats: "If poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves to a tree, it had better not come at all". 

AP 10. Ambition and competitiveness are easily confused. Jealousy of the achievements of others and holding grudges are poisons: hate, anger and jealousy will hurt you, not their object. True ambition is generous to the aspirations of others.

DR: A little poison can be highly stimulating. "It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail". See AP 4. Ambition without sharp elbows is like a car without wheels: it's going nowhere.

OK, Lights up, please. No questions, I'm afraid. Confuse Us he say, "I instruct only the passionate. I enlighten only the fervent. If a student cannot return with the other three corners of the square after I have shown them the first one, I will not repeat the lesson." Right on: plus one here. Now, any chance of that decaf coffee with oat milk in a proper china mug, as per my rider?

[The Life-Hack Guru lapses into meditative silence]

IDIOTIC HAT: Um, not a question, more a prompt: perhaps you could expand a little on a couple of the slides? It's all been a bit epigrammatic, not to say gnomic...

LIFE-HACK GURU: Hmm, OK, just one. Let's take Number 5, "the best is the enemy of the good". Now, as you know, I follow trends in kitchen design very closely.

IH: I didn't know that!

LHG: Well, now you do. Kitchen fittings are an excellent gauge of society's direction. I surely can't be the only one to have lost my shit over some baffling touch-controlled convection hob: why are there no fucking knobs on this thing?? Or to have wondered why a permanently-installed "island" with no knee space is preferable to a moveable "table"? You know that feeling that design has got the upper hand over function? That all appliances aspire to the condition of a smartphone? There's the modern world for you, served up on a slate when you would have preferred a plate.

IH: Interesting!

LHG: I don't do dull, son. Anyway, imagine you are a kitchen installer: it's easy if you try. There are thousands of them out there, mostly doing a perfectly decent, good-enough job. Your tops are level, the units stay on the wall, the heights are right for standard appliances, the plumbing works, and so on. It's a competitive business, so pricing the job is critical, which means getting the balance of labour, materials, and time spent just right. But low margins mean a jobbing fitter needs a full calendar of work, so word of mouth and online reviews are useful, but not essential if they can get a foot in the door of one of the big retailers. Very much a case of the best being the enemy of the good. Why pay more?

IH: I don't see where this is going?

LHG: Patience, young man, patience. Now, most people are happy with ready-made, standard-size MDF fittings with veneers or laminates that make them look like wood or marble, say. They're good enough! But some people want the real thing: your solid wood, yer actual marble. For these you need real carpentry skills, not just a few power tools, especially if the job has to be fitted into the irregular, hobbit-like kitchen space of some bijou listed cottage. We're talking lots of time, hard-won expertise, carefully-sourced and expensive materials: in other words, nothing but the best! Jobs like that will be fewer, your highly-skilled workforce will expect better pay, and you'll probably have a workshop to maintain, too, not just a van, so you'll be charging more. A lot more. Worse, you'll be dealing with the sort of people who can afford to be choosy. They will demand perfection and you will be expected to deliver it. Why pay less?

IH: So the rich get better stuff than the rest of us. Same as it ever was. And your point is?

LHG: Look, can you cook and store all your stuff in your good-enough MDF kitchen? Of course you can. Does food taste better prepared on Carrara marble surfaces and served on ludicrously expensive designer tableware? Of course it doesn't. So why does anyone bother with the best? Precisely because it's the enemy of the good! The wealthy must be seen to be wealthy; above all, to each other. See Veblen goods, see handbags that cost thousands. I mean, would you even know a Hermès Birkin bag if one happened to fall on you out of the overhead locker? Of course you wouldn't, you always travel economy!

Your mission, should you choose to accept it – and I'm sorry if this comes across as the well-worn life-hack cliché that it probably is – is to mix your personal brew of good-enough and the very best to your own satisfaction: you  know, cut your coat according to your cloth, light yourself a candle, don't wear socks and sandals, no one I think is in my tree, um... Dammit, I've confused meself now... It's all good, is what I'm saying. There's truth and bullshit in equal measure on either side of that angelical-diabolical ding-dong. Get the balance right – trust me, it ain't easy – and you might even earn yourself one of my gold Life-Hack Guru stickers! I'm told the ones that say "My ambition was hacked to pieces!" go for a fair bit on eBay.

IH: OK, Mr. Natural, thanks for that – I think. I'm pretty sure we can all find a takeaway message in there somewhere! So, see you in another eleven years, maybe, if you're passing this way? Here's your coffee; careful, it's hot. And less of the "young man", if you don't mind: I'm seventy-one and a half!

LHG: Exactly. And your point is?

Cattle Grids Revisited

It's always intriguing when an old post pops up in the Blogger stats, particularly when it's one I can't recall ever having written. There are now over two thousand of them, after all, some carefully crafted over many days, a few left to mature for months, but most just cobbled together in an evening (or even a rainy lunch break) to keep the blog-pot on the boil.

This one, which seems to have attracted some views this week for whatever reason, is a typical pot-boiler, dating from my penultimate year of wage-slavery, 2013, when I still had to wake up every weekday morning, achieve full consciousness, and prepare myself for another day posing as a responsible adult. It seems something had snagged my attention on the radio one morning that week (I notice it's a Friday job) and – like the speck that encourages a crystal to form – a post formed around it.

BTW, and though I say so myself, I'm struck by the excellence of those two perfectly irrelevant photos, made in the days when daily confinement to a university campus meant that I was forced to make much out of little, which has been something of a theme in my life. Which is more than a little ironic, given one of the peeves aired in this post. Read on!

Cattle Grids of Dartmoor

Listening to BBC Radio 4's Today programme, I have realised, is not the ideal way for me to wake up in the morning. I'm not talking about John Humphrys' toe-curling attempts at whimsy, Evan Davis's eternal benign haze, Sarah Montague's head-girlishness, or even James Naughtie's helium-quality windbaggery. No, those I can tolerate. They have become a familiar background noise, easily ignored, like the sound of the gas boiler kicking in at 06:30.

I'm talking about the way certain out-takes of information lodge in my subconscious mind, as it grumpily and somewhat clumsily swaps places in my head with my waking mind, like two local-radio presenters negotiating a changeover at the top of the hour. For example, for 20 or more years I have been haunted by the image of a wet cricket pitch being dried off by hovering helicopters. Did this ever really happen? Apparently so. But in my mind it has acquired that portentous, archetypal feeling that belongs to a persistent dream. It's tricky enough having to live with one's own, self-generated dream-life, without the BBC dropping its contribution into that murky pool.

Worse than this, though, is to be roused to wide-awake indignation from a sleeping start. By, let's say, a presenter's determination to treat a serious issue as mere light-hearted "human interest" filler between the heavy stuff. "Come on, Humphrys," my mind yells as it roars into life, "This is the ONLY opportunity this man will get to raise national awareness of Restless Leg Syndrome this whole YEAR, and you're using him as a straight-man!" Or there's the unquestioning veneration that is ladled over people who actually deserve the sort of merciless verbal thrashing unleashed on politicians and spin-doctors. The other morning, it was a bunch (a clang?) of "sound artists" who were getting the unwarranted easy airtime. Though it must have been a toss-up in the pre-programme conference whether they'd get the pious or the piss-take treatment.

Sound artists... I'm very wary of formulations like that. Not just because it sounds like a roundabout way of saying "musician", though there is that. Is David Hockney a "paint artist", or would that apply more appropriately to Jackson Pollock? In the end, though, "artist" is just a job description, not an honorific term, or a state of mind, or an aspiration. It means "someone who makes a living from making art". What counts as art is up for grabs, of course. So I suppose it does help to say what kind of artist you are, or hope to be.

Obviously, if someone wants to sample sounds in an interesting way, and produces compelling work that people want to listen to, then good luck to them. For example, I admire the work of Richard Skelton: I have actually bought some pieces myself. But, as I listened to these sound artists describe their "practice", I knew that sooner or later – here it comes! – it would turn into a sermon on the need for us all to pay closer attention to our surroundings, which is never anything more than a presumptious, preachy moralism disguised as aesthetics.

John Cage never intended 4'33" as an opportunity for Thought For The Day sanctimony. Any more that Marcel Duchamp intended L.H.O.O.Q. to leverage the market for "appropriated" art. I am so fed up with hearing what I think of as the Gospel of the God of Small Things. This has nothing to do with the novel by Arundhati Roy, though it has a lot to do with what people who have never read that book imagine it must be about (a classic example of a Takeaway Title). It's annoying to hear work (including my own) damned with the faint praise that it helps open our eyes (or ears) to the little things we fail to notice in our everyday lives. Grr. As I say, from a sleeping start to cold fury in five seconds. Thanks, BBC.

A large part of the theology of the Gospel of the God of Small Things is the belief that "everybody is an artist, and everything is art"; all we need is a little help to see it. Well, I disagree: no they aren't, and no it isn't. That's why some people can make a living as an artist, but most of us can't. Is everybody a plumber, and everything plumbing? No. Such people need a serious dose of some hallucinogen – preferably something spiky and unforgiving like LSD –  to teach them that to notice more can be a problem, and potentially a nightmare. There's an awful lot going on out there: be grateful for pragmatic simplifications. [1] Noticing less but in a more interesting way is the thing. Good artists do that. But it's not so much what they notice, but how they notice it and what they then make out of it that matters.

Actually, that spot on Today bothered me in another way, too. Somewhere in that brackish area of my mind, between the ebb and flow of the conscious and unconscious tides, the information was floated that a sound artist called John Drever has a CD out called Cattle Grids of Dartmoor. What?

That had me thinking involuntarily about cattle grids all day, when I had other things I needed to think about. There was the one where I rescued a lamb, trapped inside it like a cage. The one that had rolling bars that made it impossible to walk over. The one where the pit underneath was so full of stones and rubbish that even a cow wearing high-heels could walk across it. Oh, and that one which some local cattle-grid artist had painted gaudily in candy stripes. And so on. But, Cattle Grids of Dartmoor, what a great title for a CD!

Although I would probably have had something loud, guitar-driven, and kind of post-punk in mind. The sort of thing that emanates from my daughter's bedroom. But, you know those satisfying zzzzing! or brrrrrat! noises that cattle grids make when you drive over them? Well, apparently John Drever has been systematically recording them. All over Dartmoor. And he's made a CD. Go on, treat yourself!

1. I like the quote usually attributed to physicist John Wheeler, that "Time is what prevents everything happening at once. Space is what prevents it all happening to me!". Though Wheeler himself attributed it to "graffiti in the men's room of the Pecan Street Cafe, Austin, Texas". Yeah, I can hear that, sung – Guy Clark style – to a guitar accompaniment...

Nisi Dominus Frustra...

It struck me recently that it has now been eleven years since I retired, and I haven't written any programs, scripts, or even HTML pages in all that time. Not a single one. In a sense, of course, that is precisely what retirement means: you have stopped working, your accounts have lapsed, your administrator passwords have been terminated, and all the accumulated, undocumented knowledge you carry around in your head has been retired, too. Access denied! I can almost feel the empty space in my head where it used to be. But, still, I'm surprised: I had come to think of my modest code-cutting adventures as a core part of who I had become, and fully expected to continue them into retirement, perhaps even writing a few apps for smartphones that would make me stinking rich.

Do I miss it? All those operating systems, hardware configurations, and coding languages I learned, or the project management and highly-specialised data-handling expertise I acquired over 35 years? No, not at all; I'm happy to have become a civilian, where all that is concerned. So what has happened to the part of my brain that used to get such regular exercise? Well, I suspect it was quickly occupied and repurposed, like a defunct office space eagerly turned into an artist's studio.

Besides, if I'm honest, in my final years of working I found that coping with the constantly accelerating pace of change was making me anxious and unhappy. Working with IT eventually teaches you two profound life-lessons: first, that all your achievements are ephemeral, to be washed away in the next tide of change, and second, that nobody ever understands or cares what you have been doing, anyway, so long as it works and makes their life easier. Instructively, after 30 years of dedicated (and dare I say innovative) service to the university I received nothing more than a perfunctory retirement letter from the central administration, the main burden of which was to remember to hand in my keys before I left.

I suspect I may even have become a neo-Luddite. I now regret my role in the dumbing-down of university life, much as I enjoyed it at the time. What fun it was, to rise to the challenge of planning a major IT project, and what pleasure was to be had in meeting and overcoming all the technical problems thrown in our path! This, despite the knowledge that (repeat after me, young padawan) our achievements were ephemeral, to be washed away in the next tide of change, and that nobody ever understood or cared what we had managed to do, anyway. So long as it worked...

But, when the basic strategic direction is wrong, all this counts for nothing. As the motto of my secondary school (not to mention the City of Edinburgh) has it, nisi dominus frustra:

Except the Lord build the house, they labour in vain that build it:
Except the Lord keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain.
Psalm 127

The planning and, um, execution of Stalin's gulags may have been perfectly brilliant, but history will award no prizes to those who actually devised and carried out such massively complex programmes of bureaucracy and logistics. Which, from an administrator's p-o-v, does seem a little unfair. Although, even if Stalin had turned out to be one of the good guys, I expect history would merely have sent them the standard form letter, thanking them for their contribution, and reminding them to hand in their keys.

Which brings me to so-called "artificial intelligence", or AI.

Like most sane and sensible people over the age of 60, even retired IT geeks, I really want nothing to do with AI. I like to think it's a tech bubble that will eventually burst, making a lot of bandwagon-jumping enthusiasts look very silly; but I've a horrible feeling I'm going to be very wrong about that.

Now, I've always been reasonably satisfied with the performance of my own internal, organically-grown "wetware", and where it does fall short – numbers have always been a challenge for me, for example – I've accepted this as a necessary cause for humility. You won't catch me bragging about my IQ, not least because I don't know what it is and AFAIK I have never been tested. If we were ever assessed at school, then they kept very quiet about it, no doubt for good reasons. In the context I grew up in, it didn't do to stand out too much, whether by being too far above or below the acceptable range of "normal".

Of course, that doesn't mean I reject the use of tech designed to extend one's natural capacities. If you want to draw a perfectly straight line, use a ruler; if you need to work out how much you'll take away from a picture sale on which a gallery will charge a commission of 40% + VAT at 20% then use a calculator. Let's be honest, anyone able to do either of those things unaided is a flippin' freak, innit, and well deserving of whatever painful levy the playground police choose to impose on them.

The troubling thing about "AI" – a catch-all term for various ways of instantly mining vast stores of data and sticking the results together in a convincing way – is that it puts extraordinary creative power into the hands of any sorcerer's apprentice who cares to give it a try. It's no surprise that the "creative" world is in a bit of a panic about it. Two recent examples have convinced me that this alarm is not unjustified.

First, my friend and ex-colleague Martin posted this on his Substack: It Was AI Wot Dun It. I confess I was sceptical at first: what I read there was too good – publishable, even – to be machine-generated, wasn't it? It was funny, dammit. But Martin assures me that he didn't tinker at all with what ChatGPT came up with in response to a minimal prompt, which was – get this – "Q and A interview with a retiree as a rock star". What you read there (go on, follow the link) is pure AI cut 'n' paste. I was shocked. [1]

Then, on another Substack belonging to journalist David Aaronovitch, I noticed some rather impressive AI-generated illustrations he was using. Sadly, his Substack is "subscription only", so I can't link to examples. So I'll "borrow" a couple:

Trump as Joseph Smith (founder of the Mormon church)

Both also created by ChatGPT. These are impressive, I think, especially when "made" by a bloke who, to the best of my knowledge, doesn't know one end of a brush from the other (that's him, btw, in the second effort).  [2]

Worried yet, fellow "creatives"?  As we know, winners have already been disqualified from several art and photographic competitions, once it emerged their entries were AI-generated. How long before overwhelmed judges just say, fuck it, let 'em compete? Or double down on the "no digital, no photography" attitude? Let's just say I'm glad I'm not trying to make a living as an illustrator.

As ever, though, what makes AI a cause of real anxiety is the urge of employers and investors to maximise profits by employing fewer people, generally referred to as "efficiency". Nisi dominus frustra, guys... When, I wonder, will it dawn on them that the pursuit of efficiency, productivity and profits by automation and the elimination of expensive, fallible "human resources" is not the point? That people are the point, and not the problem? Not any day soon, it seems. 

As the TUC’s assistant general secretary, Kate Bell, said recently:

"AI could have transformative potential, and if developed properly, workers can benefit from the productivity gains this technology may bring." She added: "The alternative is bleak. Left unmanaged and in the wrong hands, the AI revolution could entrench rampant inequality as jobs are degraded or displaced, and shareholders get richer." (Guardian, 27 August 2025) 

Cleverness unconstrained by wisdom may yet be the downfall of our species. AI might usefully be regarded as humanity's attempt to outsource our own most distinctive feature, perhaps best represented by that traditional cartoon of a man sawing off the very branch he is sitting on. Over my working life I have witnessed several waves of happily-employed, ordinary, decent people being made redundant and their lives rendered purposeless by technology; some of it, I'm ashamed to say, implemented by me. It sometimes seems that clever technologists will not rest until the last opportunity to enjoy a meaningful life through work has been eliminated.

The advent of full-on, true "artificial intelligence", of course, will be their final ironic triumph: cleverness itself will have become redundant! In the words of everybody's favourite 13th century Sufi mystic, Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī: Sell your cleverness, and buy bewilderment. You know it makes sense.

Hawk Satori

(not AI, but one of mine: but who would know or care?)

1. It's possible, of course, given the cavalier way the AI databases have been stuffed with the unacknowledged and unrecompensed theft of the work of thousands of "creatives" of various sorts, that this is merely a warmed up piece of work stolen from somewhere. I tried searching for "fire-breathing inflatable goat" (a fairly distinctive phrase, you'd think) but Martin's Substack post is the sole hit in the entire Web. 

2. Dave and I were friends for a year at university before he got himself "sent down" for failing his first year exams, but we haven't been in touch for decades. Besides, it seems his chums these days are the likes of Phillipe Sands... I was struck by his recent claim to be nudging 22K subscribers on his Substack. Even if only 5% of these are paid subscribers at the minimum rate of £75 p.a. that's a cool £82,500... Hmm... So how much would YOU pay to read my bloviations? Don't answer that...