A Thousand Years

I probably did mean to produce an updated version of a post that I originally published in November 2011 to mark the 500th post on the blog when the 1000th and then the 2000th posts appeared – both some while ago now – but either forgot, or thought better of it; I can't remember now. But here it is, heavily tinkered with, for no better reason than I'm in need of a way to distract and entertain myself, as I'm suffering from an unpleasant bout of tonsillitis. Which is ironic, if irony ever applies in medical matters, as my tonsils were surgically removed when I was a child, which seems to have been the go-to solution in those days for any childhood ailment short of an actual broken bone. Your boy gets into mischief, or has too much imagination? Let's take his tonsils out, and see how it goes.

Fashions in medical intervention aside, we are surrounded by many mysteries, and of these the ultimate destination of vast quantities of time, and the reasons behind our precious but really rather miserly share of it, must rank among the greatest. As so many have asked, whether as the verbal equivalent of a deep sigh or in moments of profound philosophical reflection: where does the time go? Great question! (as in: pointless question, with no known answer!).

Personally, I favour the theory that, shortly after the Big Bang, some kind of collateralized loan obligation scam was perpetrated by Big Time, and large quantities of time shares ended up hidden within various as yet featureless rocks by certain malevolent parties, resulting in the subsequent uneven distribution, inflated value and short supply of time. This does sound awfully like Terry Pratchett, but it's possible I may have made it up myself, but I really can't be bothered to check. Time is definitely too short for what John Keats called, in his definition of "negative capability", such "irritable reaching after fact and reason". Although I suppose that much-quoted Keatsian "negative capability" might also justifiably be defined as "lazy complacency", and I'm never sure why we're supposed to regard this as such a Good Thing just because some 22-year-old med-school drop-out said it was. Decent poet, though.

Anyway, thinking about the passing of time, it has often pleased me to speculate that a hypothetical very, very old man, who had been sitting on the same bench every day since the year 1000 CE, would have heard our language change from Anglo-Saxon through Middle English all the way to whatever it is we're speaking now; Post-Modern English? The changes would generally have been even more imperceptible than trying to observe the movement of the hour hand on an analogue clock – the so-called Great Vowel Shift didn't happen during one Thursday afternoon in June 1447, hilarious as that would have been – but those changes were happening, all the same. So one day he's going to a church which is little more than a wattle-and-daub hut, and hearing the Lord's Prayer intoned as "Fæder ure þu þe eart on heofonum", and then, in the blink of a geological eye, various stone structures have been erected, levelled, and rebuilt on the same site, and the few people who are still going to church are now thinking that "Our Father, which art in heaven" sounds incomprehensibly old-fashioned. I mean, FFS, that's Old English, innit? Actually, no, since you ask, it's not.

But now that voices can be recorded you don't have to be 1000 years old to experience this. Listen to any archived radio programme and the voices will be as dated (and dateable) as the graphical style of vintage adverts or book dust-jackets. When I was a child in the 1950s/60s, broadcasters were still expected to acquire the clipped accents of the 1930s as the price of entry into the BBC. So-called RP ("received pronunciation") was a clear and non-negotiable marker of class and aspiration. "End nigh, the knee-ooze!" No longer, thank goodness. Although I'm really not sure whether that continuity guy with the preposterously fruity and poshed-up Caribbean bass-baritone who is all over Radio 4 these days counts as progress. I'm sorry, there is no such thing as the Bayou Tapestry, Neil, or the Kunservative Party, although I can see where you're going with that one. But to notice that "your" language is being bent into new shapes by the young is finally to take your place on that bench alongside the 1000-year-old man.

A thousand years ago, of course, the Vikings were busily carrying out their own aggressively proactive programme of linguistic intervention on these shores, once they'd got the raiding and looting thing out of their system. Consequently, bits of Scandi-talk are embedded deep in our mongrel language, so-called "English". As it happened, around the time I was writing the original 500th-post post the latest Big Thing on TV was Scandinavian thrillers – subtitled, of course – and I noticed that after I had watched a few I was experiencing a curious sensation, which felt like the awakening of some semi-dormant, atavistic elements in the deeper language-oriented parts of my brain. Not unlike a full-immersion language course, I felt I could almost, but not quite, understand Norwegian or Swedish. Although not Danish, obviously; even the Swedes scratch their heads over that Nordic-language smoothie. So, after watching enough episodes of The Killing, Wallander, and The Bridge, the ancient Viking synapses were lighting up, and I was gasping "Va fan?!" (roughly = "WTF?!") with every new plot twist.

Back in 2011 I had also come across a link to a piece on so-called "Methuselah trusts" in Lapham's Quarterly. Methuselah being the grandfather of the more famous Biblical Noah, who apparently died just 31 years short of his 1000th birthday, although how much time he spent sitting on the same bench is unrecorded. (A lot, if he was typical of 1000-year-old men). The startling idea is that a very modest amount of money placed in a single "1000-year trust" and invested at compound interest could, if actually brought to maturity, trash the world economy (although I think we have now found better ways to do that job on a far shorter timescale); essentially, a Methuselah trust would eventually require a payout that would far exceed anyone's ability to meet it. It's reminiscent of the proposition that if you were able to fold a piece of paper in half 42 times, you'd find that it reaches the moon. Which, on the face of it, does sound an awful lot cheaper and simpler than rocket travel, although to ask whether anyone could actually sit on the top of a sheet of paper folded in half 42 times is a classic example of that "irritable reaching after fact and reason".

Apparently Benjamin Franklin started one of these mad investments in 1790 in his will. Here's the quote from the Lapham's Quarterly article:

A few years before Franklin drafted his will, philosopher Richard Price rhapsodized in a sober treatise on the national debt, “One penny, put out at our Savior’s birth to 5 percent compound interest, would, in the present year 1781, have increased to a greater sum than would be contained in two hundred millions of earths, all solid gold. But, if put out to simple interest, it would, in the same time, have amounted to no more than seven shillings and sixpence.”

Hmm, that certainly puts the frankincense and myrrh in their place, but show your working, please. Otherwise that's surely just the 18th century equivalent of Hunter S. Thompson-esque "gonzo journalism": too much coffee and snuff, probably.

But, no, it turns out that it wasn't the snuff talking. As I'd hoped, my old friend Andy, a.k.a. Science Man, came up with the mathematical goods:

1 penny (d) invested for 1780 years at 5% would yield 1 x 1.05^1780 = 5.2 x 10^37 d
Price of gold was fixed by Isaac Newton in 1717 at £4 8s 9d per troy ounce (it stayed this way for about 200 years)
1 troy ounce = 31.03g
Therefore price of gold = 4x240 + 8x12 + 9 d/troy ounce = 1065 d/troy ounce
1065d/31.103g = 34.32d/g = 34,320d/kg
Therefore 5.2 x 10^37d could buy (5.2 x 10^37)/(34320) kg of gold = 1.52 x 10^33 kg
The mass of the Earth is about 5.978 x 10^24 kg (OU Science Data Book 1978)
Therefore 1.52 x 10^33 represents (1.52 x10^33)/(5.978 x 10^24) Earth masses = 2.54 x 10^8 Earth masses
i.e. about 250 million Earth masses (at 1780 gold prices)

Actually, most online sources say that Newton, in his role as Master of the Royal Mint, fixed the price of gold at £3 17s 10p per troy ounce, but I can't be bothered to redo the sums (well, let's be honest and admit that I probably can't do that, bothered or not). But, point taken; to quibble over a few million solid gold "Earth masses" here or there would be nothing more than the worst sort of "irritable reaching after fact and reason", wouldn't it. But, I suddenly wonder, has anyone checked Franklin's or indeed Newton's savings accounts lately? Could this be another of those collateralized-loan-obligation-style scams in progress? If so, why, Ben, why?

 

The mention of pounds, shillings and pence and difficult arithmetic is a salutary reminder of the now long-ago pre-decimal days in Britain. It's easy to forget the sheer oddness of calculating twelve pennies to the shilling, and twenty shillings to the pound (not to mention one pound and one shilling to the guinea for upscale purchases like racing horses or golden planets). In those days before electronic tills, shop assistants had to be pretty nimble with their mental arithmetic. Thinking about this, for me the penny finally dropped (sorry!) that the only reason our children are still being made to learn their eleven and twelve "times tables" is because, over half a century ago, we had an insane system of coinage, not to mention our weights and measures. It seems other, more rational countries only make their kids learn multiplication tables up to a sensible ten. Wimps! Makes you proud to be British, and the inheritor of multiple systems based on our national negative capability, doesn't it? To quote John Keats again, "Time is money, and money time, that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know" (Ode On What Does A Grecian Earn).

So, here's a fairly typical primary-school level question of the sort we grappled with back in 1960:

Mister Brown has ordered half a ton of coal: how much will that cost him at 11s and 6d per hundredweight sack? Quick, boy, quick, the lorry driver is waiting! [1]

But just look at the time! Where does it go? I have my next appointment with various medicinal compounds coming up, including 500 mg of Amoxicillin or, if you prefer, 7.72 troy grains "in old money" (a little boilerplate joke we Brits have yet to tire of making. Give it time: it's only been fifty-five years...). But I have to say that fiddling about with this post has done the trick, and taken my mind off the sore throat, the coughing, the croak, and general medicated wooziness for the past few mornings, and today I'm feeling a lot better. Time to stop polishing this one into a mirror shine, and start on another.

Someone has surely got their quantities wrong with these mint humbugs?

(We're going to need a bigger jar)

1. The answer is £5 15s 0d. How? There are 20 hundredweights (cwt) in a ton (not 100, duh!), so half a ton is 10 cwt. Multiply the units separately: 11 shillings × 10 = 110 shillings; 6 pence × 10 = 60 pence. Convert the pence to shillings: 60 pence ÷ 12 = 5 shillings exactly, no pennies left over. Add the shillings: 110s + 5s = 115 shillings. Now convert the shillings to pounds:115 shillings ÷ 20 = 5 pounds with a remainder of 15 shillings. Simple! What took you so long?

Close Encounters

But where is everybody?

Enrico Fermi

The mighty ships tore across the empty wastes of space and finally dived screaming on to the first planet they came across – which happened to be the Earth – where due to a terrible miscalculation of scale the entire battle fleet was accidentally swallowed by a small dog.

Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Two possibilities exist: Either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.

Arthur C. Clarke, Visions: How Science Will Revolutionize the 21st Century

The universe is a pretty big place. If it’s just us, it seems like an awful waste of space.

Carl Sagan, Cosmos

Two Dawns

Sadly for us, our regular Easter rental in mid-Wales, an award-winning barn conversion – yes, there is such a thing – is no longer available: the owner's son and family moved in directly after we had enjoyed the very last available booking slot this Easter. It does seem a pretty remote location to be bringing up four young children, not to mention the patchy phone reception for two adults working from home – I'm not even sure how a reliable WiFi service could be provided – but I'm sure they'll manage. Or, if they don't, maybe the property will become available again... 

One of the attractions of the place for me has always been that it sits high on the west-facing shoulder of a valley, and our bedroom has a small balcony, so I could roll out of bed at the crack of dawn, and – if the lighting and weather conditions looked promising – lean out and photograph the expanse of the valley below and the hills beyond without even getting dressed. Inversion fogs, driving rain, pretty sunshine, even snow; anything could be happening out there in Wales at Easter, and as every admirer of landscapes knows, elevation is the key to opening out the elements in the view. In the absence of anything else a photographer can always climb a tree, stand on the roof of a car (probably best to stick to your own), or even lug along a stepladder. No, really: several view-camera users have described using a stepladder to me, including the estimable Jem Southam.

So over the years I've accumulated some striking examples of barefoot, pre-breakfast landscape photography; the sort of thing you'd have to do a substantial pre-dawn uphill hike to achieve otherwise. Some of which I have cropped into a panoramic format, like the two above (both taken with a telephoto lens steadied on the balcony rail), as that best conveys the expansive feel of the bedroom prospect.

But on my recent visit to the RA Summer Exhibition I saw this:

Olivia Wells, Pulmo 8

Which is actually a 2D print, and this reminded me that a couple of years ago, by using a bit of elementary Photoshop wizardry, I had already mocked up some concertina-folded "leporello" booklets in a similar, but to my eye more convincing trompe-l'œil fashion:

A riddle (answer: tinnitus. I later added a title, "This Is Not A Drill")

It seemed a bit gimmicky at the time but, having had my interest re-piqued in that approach, I wondered: why not do something similar with those Welsh panoramas? If nothing else, doubled up they would fit nicely into one of the cheap 60cm x 30cm frames I have lying around. So that is what I have been playing around with lately, and I think it does add a certain something to the "straight" versions. Bear in mind that the result is a single entirely flat sheet of paper and is also not a photograph of two actual folded and opened out concertinas, although I suppose I hope that at first sight – but only at first sight – you might think it was in some way "real".

So, might I bother to submit something like this to next year's RA Summer Exhibition, or anywhere else, come to that? Probably not: the open exhibition lottery game gets old (and expensive) after you've had rather more misses than hits, and it's a shame to spoil the innocent fun of "creativity" as an end in itself by inviting the judgement of a random assortment of know-nothing, boss-eyed ████s, usually practising artists who, like so many job interviewers, seem generally to be looking for clones of themselves. [1]

RA Summer Exhibition 2026

(the pigeon, by Humphrey Ocean RA, was sold for £14,000)

1. Incidentally, if a young person near you is looking for a job, they could do worse than read my post Inflexible Attitude, Hates a Challenge, my guide to job applications based on decades of experience as an interviewer.

BTW: if anyone else is finding that Blogger is refusing to add images to your posts (since, I suspect, a recent Windows 10 upgrade) I know the answer. Email me (see "View My Complete Profile" for an address).

Locals

It's a noticeable aspect of modern life in Britain that to be a genuine "local" is, nearly everywhere, becoming unusual. Although it is a process that has been going on for some time: the recent arrival at the British Museum of the Bayeux Tapestry is a reminder of quite how long strangers of one denomination or another have been rocking up on these shores and moving people about as a consequence. Unrest and resentment provoked by "replacement" of local populations seems to be a universal of human life: just ask the inhabitants of the Celtic nations how they feel, even today, about the "Saxons" squatting on the prime agricultural land of what became "England". Those of them, that is, who can actually claim descent from those displaced aboriginal Brits. I don't suppose the Sikhs of Swansea care very much at all, although they may have something to say about the activities of the British as a whole in India.

My mother grew up in a village in North Hertfordshire in the 1920s and 30s, surrounded by cousins and the descendants of families who had lived in the area for centuries. Remarkably, however, her father was a blow-in from, of all places, Liverpool, brought into the area by the army during WW1. By the time my grandparents died in the 1970s their village was becoming populated by incomers, mostly commuters from the professional classes buying into some imagined idyll of rural life, the precarious reality of which they were actively destroying. No need for a village shop when you can drive into a nearby town and stock up the freezer from the bountiful shelves of a supermarket. Who wants to use a pub full of unwelcoming flat-capped old geezers talking rural gibberish? And a bit of street lighting and some proper metalled roads wouldn't go amiss, either: let's get onto the Parish Council.

To be "local" is more a state of mind than the outcome of genealogy, however. There was significant unrest when the first New Town was designated in North Herts in the 1940s. The small town of Stevenage was to be developed into a grand utopian vision of a new life for many thousands of poorly-housed working-class Londoners. The inhabitants of what would come to be known as "the old town" – little more than a large village, really – protested, accusing the Labour government of Soviet-style central planning. When Lewis Silkin, the Minister for Town and Country Planning, arrived by train from London to put the case, some jokers had replaced the platform sign "Stevenage" with "Silkingrad". So, as it came to pass, in 1954 I was born in Silkingrad, and by the the time I left home in 1976 I felt about as local as it is possible for a young person without any "propertied interest" in a place to feel. However, as one embodiment of Silkin's vision of "a new type of citizen, a healthy, self-respecting, dignified person with a sense of beauty, culture and civic pride" – I know! – I was determined never to come back.

Old Stevenage

New Stevenage

After some years of post-university precarity, my partner and I arrived in this semi-detached house in a modest street in Southampton in 1988, which we had bought from a pair of doctors who, like us, were moving on in pursuit of professional careers. Our children grew up here, but moved on themselves years ago, also in pursuit of opportunities in the wider world. Our street has gradually changed its personality over nearly 40 years. Old neighbours have died or moved away. Houses that were formerly owned or rented by single families like ours have become HMOs ("houses of multiple occupancy"); many of the occupants are not – or not yet – British citizens. The number of cars parked in the street seems to double every few years, and many if not most front gardens have been paved over to accommodate them.

When one of our oldest neighbours, a widow who lived directly opposite, sold up last year in order to live in Australia with her daughter – a migration saga in itself – her next-door neighbours on either side held a small "Goodbye to Mary" party for her: on one side a French family, on the other a South Asian family. The party was organised by the former and hosted by the latter – both families' relationship with Mary was a lot closer than ours – and the curries laid on at the sit-down meal were delicious. Apart from ourselves, the other guests were from two doors down, an elderly couple who had lived in the street longer than any of us, but whose names I did not know and with whom I had never before exchanged more than a few polite words of greeting as I passed by. It turned out that of the nine people in the room they were the only true locals, with long-standing family connections to the docks and many lively stories to tell of the former occupants of all our houses.

The new occupants of Mary's house are a Turkish family. Our own next-door neighbours are, on one side, a Filipino couple who bought the house long enough ago for their baby son Elijah to have grown up and left home, and on the other side is what is now an HMO, serially occupied by Filipino trainee nurses who work at the nearby hospital. This is a typical story of present-day suburban Britain, and it seems to be one that is making some self-declared "locals" very angry.

Without resorting too far to stereotypes, I'd say the angry locals fall into two broad types. There are the ones who probably found schooling uncongenial, stayed in or near the place they had been born and grown up, and really just wanted things to go on as they were forever, but who paid a heavy price when neo-liberal global movements of capital left them without work or prospects. I expect a lot of them may even have been conned into voting for this. Then there are the ones who made a success of their lives, moved on, and settled in "nicer" neighbourhoods, and who resent the arrival of new neighbours who are not like them, or at least do not look like them, and often turn out to be competitive business rivals. They definitely did not vote for that.

At its worst, at its most poisonous and most dangerous, this anger can take the form of a militant ethno-nationalism, a nostalgia for a country that never was: a fondly-imagined paradise of full employment and low taxes occupied by a people who shared a single ethnicity. This white-supremacist anger now trades under the false flag of "patriotism" and even – this would be hilarious if it wasn't so tragic – of "Christianity": I read that the black-clad "patriots" who recently turned up mob-handed in Dover and Portsmouth to protest the arrival of yet more small inflatables overloaded with would-be asylum claimants were chanting "Christ is king!".

What? Seriously? This is all so profoundly un-British that the interference of certain foreign hands with money and malign disruptive intent seems certain. It has a distinctly musky pungency. Why, it seems every protester had been assured in advance of the best legal representation possible, should that become necessary. I suppose there may be a few sympathetic right-wing lawyers out there prepared to offer their services pro bono, but that seems uncharacteristically generous, especially at the scale that might have been required if things had kicked off in the usual mindlessly violent fashion. Which they didn't: it seems these present-day blackshirts had been well-briefed on how to stay within the law. A restraint which must have hurt: a triumph of the will if ever there was one. Which is also troubling: these guys are learning their way through (or being guided through) the legal maze.

It has been said that there are really only two stories: (a) someone goes on a journey, and (b) a stranger comes to town. Which are essentially the same story, told from opposing points of view. It is clear that this story is being played out in real life today, on a global scale, as the world begins to smoulder and burn. So now would be a good time to consider our role in this story, and how we want to play it. I'd also like to invite those black-clad self-styled "Christian" vigilantes to acquaint themselves with the source text of their newly professed beliefs:

42 For I was an hungred, and ye gave me no meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me no drink:
43 I was a stranger, and ye took me not in: naked, and ye clothed me not: sick, and in prison, and ye visited me not.
44 Then shall they also answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an hungred, or athirst, or a stranger, or naked, or sick, or in prison, and did not minister unto thee?
45 Then shall he answer them, saying, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least of these, ye did it not to me.
46 And these shall go away into everlasting punishment: but the righteous into life eternal.

Matthew 25

Crusades, witch-burnings, and pogroms may have been carried out by Christians, even endorsed by church leaders, but they are not Christian; neither is a person of "Christian heritage" who can't tell the Lord's Prayer from the National Anthem. There's a difference.

Now, I do not understand the motivations of those who risk everything to cross the Channel for a chance to live here in Britain – you're already in France, people; France, FFS! – and, yes, there are frauds, criminals, and bad actors among them. But we already have quite a few frauds, criminals, and bad actors of our own, which is why we have laws and police and a judicial system to enforce them, however unsatisfactorily slowly the mills of justice grind. And, yes, it is concerning that between 700,000 and 900,000 unauthorised immigrants have arrived in a country where housing, schools, medical and social services are already stretched to the limit. OTOH our birth-rate is in serious decline, and someone is going to have to be paying taxes to fund stuff, not least my care when I'm really old.

But to deport precisely those incomers on whom these services have already come to depend will solve nothing. People such as my neighbours, for example, who are now British citizens, and probably already feel more like locals than I do, born and bred as I was in faraway Silkingrad in a long-ago era, a barely remembered time when creating "a new type of citizen, a healthy, self-respecting, dignified person with a sense of beauty, culture and civic pride" was high on the social agenda. Talk about nostalgia for a country that never was...

Of course, the sad truth is that in old age we will all become strangers in a strange land, even if it is nominally the same one we grew up in. As George Orwell put it:

What can the England of 1940 have in common with the England of 1840? But then, what have you in common with the child of five whose photograph your mother keeps on the mantelpiece? Nothing, except that you happen to be the same person.

George Orwell, England Your England

It's curious to think how much closer we are now to the unimaginable England of 2040 than to the England of 1940 – the heyday of my parents' generation, and not so  much "our" as their finest hour – or even to 1984, the year I turned thirty and arrived in Southampton. Nineteen Eighty-Four... Orwell's dystopian vision – with the UK absorbed and rebadged by Big Brother's authoritarian empire Oceania as Airstrip One, not to mention the Thought Police, doublespeak, newspeak, and all that – somehow feels a lot less like a warning than a prediction today, doesn't it?

So perhaps it's time to force open a few windows and let in some sunlight to banish that musky smell? We must not allow angry "locals" to get in the way of our next attempt to build Jerusalem / Utopia / New Atlantis / Nowhere / Silkingrad in our still sort-of green and reasonably pleasant land. Let's put the creation of "a new type of citizen, a healthy, self-respecting, dignified person with a sense of beauty, culture and civic pride" back on the agenda. Although we should probably scrutinise that "civic pride" bit more closely; I know what Silkin meant but, wrongly interpreted, it's the sort of thing that can sometimes lead "locals" into trouble. [1]

But, top tip: do keep an ear open for any clocks striking thirteen...

1. Far be it from me, as a non-local, to stoke the traditional rivalry between Southampton ("scummers") and Portsmouth ("skates"), but... It seems that yesterday, in the town that allegedly confused a paediatrician with a paedophile (not actually true), a contingent of angry Portsmouth locals really did confuse the arrival of a Pakistan under-19 cricket team by coach at a hotel with the arrival of more unwelcome unauthorised immigrants, so they entered the hotel and started knocking on doors, presumably with the intention of intimidating the new arrivals.

[BTW Apologies for the paucity of pictures. Part-way through writing this post Blogger stopped uploading images. Hopefully this is a temporary glitch.]

Something to Say

I was idly browsing in the Waterloo Station branch of Foyles bookshop recently, when I found myself in front of a surprisingly large display of "recent fiction". There were at least a hundred books there, maybe even twice that – presumably itself a curated selection from the latest publications – mostly by authors I had never heard of or seen reviewed, and who, according to recent figures – if they're among the lucky ones – will be earning a typical income of around £7K, which is not very far from just half of the new UK State Pension. Most must therefore still be living with parents, supported by a partner who has a reliable income, writing in the spare time afforded by a full- or part-time job, or have some sort of independent income. The days of cheap living in garrets, bedsits, and squats surviving on generous state benefits have long gone. [1]

As someone who abandoned the idea of living the writing life decades ago, I find it hard to understand why so many people still feel the need to write fiction that practically no-one will ever read, and which will never earn them a living wage. It's not as if finishing a novel worth reading and then actually getting it published is either easy or quick. It's even harder to understand why the publishers keep pushing out such overwhelming quantities of not particularly outstanding fiction. It surely cannot make sense as a business model, unless the gamble is that one or two mega bestsellers will emerge every few years that are able to pay for all the rest; apart, that is, from those who do not even make it into the pension-level "mid-list" and who are doubtless regularly and unceremoniously culled.

I am not and have never been a publishing insider, and have no insights to offer on that front. Self-evidently, though, I am a writer of sorts. See? This is me writing! I can't help it. I enjoy it. So much so I don't even ask you to pay to read what I have written. What an idiot, though: "No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money", as Samuel Johnson reportedly said, and he's not wrong. But today there is an irresistible alternative to adding to some publisher's "slush pile" for those of us blockheads who enjoy writing for its own sake, which is, of course, self-publication on the Web. Blogs, Substack, Bluesky, even Facebook and that other thing that used to be Twitter... The internet is packed with so many thousands of self-styled writers like me asking for your attention, sometimes even for your money, that the very idea of being a writer has been diluted into something approaching homeopathic status. We're all scribblers now.

Finishing a novel may be hard, but banging out short pieces like this is relatively easy, certainly as compared to singing or playing the piano (which is actually impossible, as I have previously demonstrated to my own satisfaction, if nobody else's). In effect, a social-media writer is like one of those prolific letter-writers of earlier centuries, in love with the new communication technology of the postage stamp. I think of John Cage's often-quoted words:

I have nothing to say
and I am saying it
and that is poetry
as I need it
(Lecture on Nothing, 1949)

Just substitute "writing" for "poetry" and there you have most social media. How far anyone else needs it is a good question.

You don't need some fancy literary theory to realise that there are two main variables that add distinction to any sort of writing: content and quality. And also, I suppose, entertainment value... There are three main variables... Plus, of course, an appreciative target audience... There are four main variables... [Stop it. Ed.]. But, being able to write well and even entertainingly is one thing; thousands of us have that capacity. Good content, however – having (or at least believing you have) something to say – is rather different.

I'm not talking about originality, which is both rare and overrated. Even the most celebrated "original" things usually turn out to be versions of other less-celebrated things, and mere novelty fails to inspire that most sincere tribute, imitation. True innovation, like evolution, is wary of freakish outliers; four legs good, five legs ridiculous. Often, when writing these blog posts, I have been convinced that I'd just come up with some amusing expression, perhaps some twist on a familiar phrase, that had surely to be a first. Sometimes I check, and almost always Google instantly assures me that I was wrong. Almost always...

[A digression: whenever I think about "originality" I have a flashback to an upstairs classroom around 1968, where one of my secondary-school English teachers – George Partridge, a gaunt, elderly eccentric, a survival from an earlier age and perhaps the very last man still to wear an academic gown in a state school – is striding between our rows of desks, and declaiming:

I want to do something original
But I don't know where to begin
For there's nothing original in me
Except an original sin... [1]

George was given to random corporal punishment for real or imagined transgressions, and the way he was whacking his fist into his palm to pound out the metre implied an ear-clipping for someone was imminent. Frankly, I doubt whether any of us had the faintest idea of what "original sin" might be, although we knew well enough when to shut up and look innocent when George was off on one.]

So, forgetting about originality, writers are sometimes classed as either foxes or hedgehogs, as in "a fox knows many things, but a hedgehog knows one big thing": an idea often attributed to Isaiah Berlin, but which – see "originality" above – appears to have proceeded to Berlin by a road that leads from Ancient Greece via the Renaissance Netherlands. Writers of fiction tend to be "hedgehogs" – not a few famous novelists have been accused of having one idea that they tackled multiple times from slightly different directions – as do bloggers and allied social-media trades, where the stakes are low but the ego is high. We have this thing, and we keep bashing away at it.

The main thing we have to bash, of course, is an endless fascination with the various Just-So stories that account for the bottomless source of wonder that is our own really quite ordinary life. You've probably noticed. We may try to disguise it by making ourselves exemplars of broader themes, but the underlying self-obsession always shows through. Of course, virtually none of this Web-scale torrent of self-scrutiny will ever make it into print. Certainly not as the equivalent of those multi-volume collections of some luminary's correspondence, marginal notations and unpublished leftovers: you need to be known for something else, something rather more substantial, for those scraps to have any value. The not particularly exciting or unusual tale of how, say, a heterosexual white male was transformed from a mildly rebellious teen with a taste for the safer recreational drugs into a responsibly sober citizen and family man with, oh, let's say an administrative job in a university and a sanity-saving sideline in some sort of art is not a story that is of much interest to a publisher these days, if it ever was. Just, you know, to pick an example at random.

Genre fiction aside (that's a very big "aside", I realise), what many readers seem to crave – that is, those people who actually buy books, and keep publishers in business – are misery memoirs, true crime, tales from the wilder fringes of identity, and above all stories of triumph over adversity. Combine three out of these four, and we're talking potential bestseller. So if, for whatever reason, you suffer from the urge to see yourself in print, one way is to write a jazzed up, fictionalised version of "what you know best" – i.e. your own life  – calculated to satisfy that public appetite. Which is not a problem, if you choose to go down the fiction route; this is, after all, pretty much what all first novels have always been. I don't read much "literary" fiction these days, but I understand that tricksy "autofictions" where the protagonist has the same name as the author, or the book is a self-scrutinising account of how it came to be written, are all the rage with the smart set. So there's that, too. But I'm a simple-minded guy at heart, and I'm happy with the idea that an author is just making it all up; it doesn't excite me to be invited into some unhappy soul's hall-of-mirrors jousts with "language" and "reality", with everything safely insulated within multiple layers of ironic stylistic scare quotes. Besides, I'm never sure how far such obsessive probing of metaphysical wounds is genuine or merely a fashionable writerly pose, a ticket of admission to some inner, alienated circle of "important" readers.

But autofiction is clearly a rarefied taste, and first novels rarely make the bestsellers list. What the mass readership really wants – apart from ripping yarns, romantasy, and tales of swords 'n' sorcery – are The Juicy Facts and The Inspirational Truth, with the emphasis on "facts" and "truth". So it's not surprising if outrage explodes when it is revealed that your allegedly True Account of My Amazing Journey From Darkness Into Light is a self-serving pack of lies.

There is a revealing list on Wikipedia of "fake memoirs and journals", from the 19th century to the present day. It is astonishing how fake Holocaust memoirs have come to be published to great acclaim, for example, not to mention the military fantasies of saloon-bar SAS fanboys and phoney combat veterans. You'd think publishers would be wise to this sort of thing by now; maybe even do a little rudimentary fact-checking before drawing up a contract? But somehow offerings like The Salt Path and Great and Unfortunate Things keep hitting the shelves, tasty and marketable concoctions that, after someone else does do a little rudimentary fact-checking, turn out to be hovering somewhere rather too near fiction than fact. [3]

Of course, if they're well-enough written, and tick all the right boxes – content, quality, entertainment value, and target audience – such made-to-measure fabulations are probably enjoyable and even instructive to read anyway, and all publishers know that the publicity value of exposure and scandal may even boost sales. After all, hasn't the whole point of "literature" always been that "something to say" can be attractively wrapped up in a pack of lies? See, for example, Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe's big, bold, bare-faced fibathon, the fake memoir that is usually held responsible for kicking off the whole subsequent tradition of literary fabrication for fun and profit, a.k.a. the writing of prose fiction in English.

Well, perhaps not so much for "profit"; not for the authors, anyway. Would-be writers should take note of Defoe's lifelong familiarity with the inside of a debtors' prison. I mean, really? £7K a year, if you're one of the lucky ones? No, listen to your parents, kids, and get a proper job first. And we don't mean teaching "creative writing"...

Frontispiece and title page of the first edition, 1719

Note: "Written by Himself"

1. The new UK State Pension is about £12,500 p.a. Reliable figures are hard to come by, but the general picture seems to be that the typical traditionally-published novel will sell fewer than 1,000 copies in its entire "lifetime". Typically, a publisher's advance for fiction will be around £5,000 or less, but the author will only receive a 10% royalty on copies sold after that advance has "earned out" for the publisher, probably somewhere approaching those 1,000 copies? Lots of luck, guys... Call me a philistine, but I'd love to see a book along the lines of "Bank Statements of Some Well-Known Writers" (maybe it exists?), setting out just how their bills got paid. Although see the example of Daniel Defoe in the final paragraphs below...

2. Actually a misremembered rendering of some occasional verse,  "To a Young Lady, Who Asked Me to Write Something Original for Her Album", composed in 1840 by the now largely-forgotten, but apparently once well-known and influential Scottish poet James Campbell:

   An original something, fair maid, you would win me
      To write—but how shall I begin?
      For I fear I have nothing original in me—
      Excepting Original Sin.

3. You might be interested to read of a particularly curious case of self-fabulation in this post from 2013, Second Acts. Or, even better, the astounding true story of Count No Account, Charles DeRudio.