If a Bird Shat on Your Head

I was once discussing toilet habits around the world with my old Dad.

Britain, naturally, has always regarded itself as a reasonably civilised country. We have indoor plumbing, sewage systems, bathrooms and an almost devotional attachment to quilted toilet paper. We therefore tend to regard some foreign lavatorial practices with a mixture of curiosity and mild suspicion.

My Dad listened to all this and then demolished the entire argument with one sentence.

“If a bird shat on your head, would you be satisfied with wiping it off with a piece of paper?”

True wisdom.

Because when you put it like that, our national devotion to dry paper suddenly looks rather less like civilisation and rather more like something we simply got used to.

If you had mud on your hands, you would wash them. If you trod in something unpleasant, you would not polish your shoe with a tissue and declare the matter closed. If, as Dad suggested, a passing pigeon deposited its breakfast on your forehead, nobody would hand you a sheet of Andrex and tell you that hygiene had now been satisfactorily restored.

You would use water.

Yet move the same basic problem a couple of feet down the human anatomy and large parts of Britain become strangely attached to the concept of dry wiping.

Other cultures reached a different conclusion. Bidets remain commonplace in parts of Europe. Across much of Asia and the Middle East, washing with water is entirely normal. Japan, having approached the matter with the usual Japanese enthusiasm for engineering, decided that merely supplying water was insufficient and built lavatories apparently capable of preparing for orbital launch.

Meanwhile, we British have spent decades improving the softness, thickness, fragrance and embossing of the paper.

There is something wonderfully British about that. Faced with a fundamentally imperfect method, we did not reconsider the method. We simply developed increasingly luxurious versions of the imperfect method.

Four-ply. Aloe vera. Quilted. Extra soft.

Still paper.

None of this means civilisation can be ranked according to lavatory equipment. Human beings have devised all sorts of perfectly workable ways of dealing with the unavoidable consequences of digestion, usually depending on climate, plumbing, religion, infrastructure and tradition.

But it does illustrate something broader.

We are remarkably good at assuming that whatever we grew up doing must also be the sensible way of doing it.

Food, driving, measurements, plumbing, social customs, even the correct way to make tea. Familiarity quietly disguises itself as logic.

Occasionally somebody asks a very simple question and the whole edifice wobbles.

My Dad's question has remained with me for years.

If a bird shat on your head, would you really just wipe it with a piece of paper?

Exactly.

When Sex Meant Gender

I was watching Anastasia, the 1956 film with Yul Brynner and Ingrid Bergman, when Helen Hayes, as the Dowager Empress, came out with this:

“To a woman of your age, sex should mean nothing but gender.”

Brilliant.

I actually stopped at the word “sex”, because this was 1956. Hollywood was still operating under the Production Code, and you tend to imagine that even saying the word would have had someone in a dark suit reaching for a red pencil.

But apparently not. The word itself was not the problem. The Production Code itself used it repeatedly. What mattered was what films actually did with the subject. Explicit sexual treatment, excessive passion and anything considered obscene or too suggestive were another matter altogether.

Which, when you think about it, probably made the writing better.

The line is plainly about sexual desire. There is no mystery there at all. The Dowager is telling another elderly woman that, at her age, her interest in sex ought really to have become academic. But she gets away with it by switching meanings halfway through the sentence. Sex as activity becomes sex as classification.

That is the joke. Nothing more is needed.

And that, oddly, is what struck me most. The audience is simply expected to get it. Nobody explains the double meaning. Nobody pauses to establish definitions. Nobody wanders in afterwards to point out that sex and gender are not quite the same thing, or that attitudes to ageing and sexuality have moved on, or that elderly women are entitled to have desires too.

Of course they are. That is not the point. The point is that the joke is allowed to exist.

We have become very odd about language. In some ways we are vastly more relaxed than people were in 1956. You can show and say things now that would have given the old censors palpitations. Yet at the same time we have become far less relaxed about words themselves. Everything has to be unpacked, qualified, contextualised and checked for ideological contamination.

A line like that now would be dissected before the audience had finished laughing.

Somebody would want to discuss the distinction between sex and gender. Somebody else would object to the implication that old people cease to be sexual beings. Then someone would point out that the joke relies on binary classification. By the time everyone had finished being correct, the joke would be lying dead on the floor.

And perhaps that is why so much old dialogue feels sharper. Not because people were cleverer then, and certainly not because censorship was a good thing. It plainly was not. But restriction forced writers to imply rather than announce. They had to trust the audience to hear what was actually being said beneath the respectable wording.

That requires rather more skill than simply saying everything out loud. The Dowager Empress does not explain herself. She does not qualify the remark. She reaches for one meaning of a word, replaces it with another, and demolishes the poor woman in a sentence.

And the best bit is that the line is not really about sex or gender anyway. It is about age, and the magnificent assumption that desire ought eventually to pack its bags, leave quietly and confine itself to administration.

I am not entirely convinced it does.

Village People

I live in a village, so I have a perspective on what people mean when they talk about protecting village life. I moved here myself, although I married someone whose family history in the area goes back to pre-Conquest days. That does not make my opinions more valuable than anyone else’s, but it does make me wary of people claiming to speak for “the village” as though everyone in it wants the same thing.

 Many people who grew up in villages find that the work and housing they need are elsewhere. They move to towns and cities, while houses back home are bought by people who can afford to commute from them or retire to them. The new arrivals have every right to be there. But it is a bit rich to arrive for the peace and quiet, then insist that nothing should change, even when change might give somebody else the chance to stay.

Of course, a proposed development might be dreadful. Some are. But when someone says it would be “bad for the village”, I want to ask: bad for whom? For the person who might get a proper job close to home, or for the person whose view of the fields might change?

A community needs more than attractive houses and people willing to organise the fête. It needs somewhere for younger adults to live, and work that pays enough for them to do so. Otherwise the village gradually becomes a pleasant place to sleep between trips to an office, or to spend a comfortable retirement. The people who grew up in it come back to visit their parents, if their parents can still afford to live there.

None of that means every field should be built on or every employer welcomed with open arms. Roads, noise, pollution and the nature of the work all matter. Residents are entitled to raise those questions, and should expect proper answers. But “we moved here for the peace and quiet” is an argument about the life you bought for yourself from a catalogue. It does not automatically settle what is best for everyone else.

What particularly grates is the claim to speak for the village. Often the people with most at stake in its future are missing from the meeting because they have already had to leave. They cannot object to a lack of housing from a house they cannot afford.

So by all means ask what a proposal will do to village life. Then ask whose lives are being counted. If protecting the village means keeping its view while losing its young people, we ought at least to be honest about what we are protecting.

The Nelson Loaf Incident

It began, as these things often do, with a body.

The deceased was found at approximately 05:55 hours, lying several inches from a partially eaten slice of Nelson loaf. There were no obvious signs of a struggle, although the victim was on its back, which in fly circles is rarely encouraging.

The first question in any investigation is motive.

The Nelson loaf had one immediately. It was sitting there, flagrantly displaying seeds, grains and assorted nutritious debris, the sort of thing calculated to attract attention from any passing insect with poor judgement. Whether the fly intended theft, trespass or merely an opportunistic breakfast remains unclear.

Opportunity is rather easier.

The fly was in the kitchen. The bread was in the kitchen. I was also in the kitchen, which technically makes me a person of interest, although I reject any suggestion that my possession of both a bread knife and a fly swat constitutes evidence of premeditation.

There are several possible theories.

The first is natural causes. Flies do die. Indeed, compared with most criminal suspects, they do it with suspicious frequency. The victim may simply have reached the end of a short but presumably fulfilling career involving windows, lampshades and repeated attempts to escape through perfectly transparent glass.

The second possibility is death by misadventure.

Nelson loaf is formidable stuff. This particular specimen contains enough seeds to establish a modest agricultural holding. Perhaps the fly landed expecting ordinary bread, encountered a sunflower seed the size of its torso and suffered some sort of catastrophic dietary event.

There is also the possibility of foul play.

The slice itself cannot be ruled out. It had means, opportunity and, arguably, motive. Being gradually eaten alive must engender resentment. One can imagine the bread lying there silently while the fly approached, waiting for precisely the right moment before deploying a strategically positioned pumpkin seed.

Forensic examination of the scene revealed crumbs scattered over the chopping board. These might indicate a violent struggle, although they might equally indicate that somebody had cut bread on it. Investigators are keeping an open mind.

There were no witnesses.

The toaster declined to comment.

The butter dish is believed to have information relevant to the inquiry but has so far remained refrigerated and uncooperative.

A nearby kettle was interviewed and became extremely heated.

One troubling aspect remains the position of the body. The fly is several inches from the bread. If the Nelson loaf was responsible, how did the victim travel that distance?

Did it stagger away after the attack?

Was the body moved?

Or are we looking at something darker still - a carefully staged scene intended to implicate an innocent loaf?

Detectives are now examining the possibility of a second slice.

Until toxicology reports are available, the cause of death must remain officially unexplained. But one thing is clear.

Something happened in that kitchen.

And Nelson loaf knows more than it is saying.

The US of Irritation

I have a small linguistic irritation. Nothing serious. No letters to The Times, no campaign group, no need for a referendum. It is the habit some people have of saying USA instead of America. For reasons I cannot quite defend, it jars.

“I went to the USA.”

Did you? Were you attending a trade delegation, filing a customs declaration, representing Britain at the United Nations? Nobody says, “I spent three weeks driving across the UK,” and produces the same reaction. UK is perfectly normal. We use it without thinking. We live in it, complain about it and occasionally threaten to leave it. And yet USA somehow sounds as though it ought to be printed in block capitals on the side of a shipping container.

This is, of course, completely illogical. The United States of America is abbreviated to USA. The United Kingdom is abbreviated to UK. There is no sensible linguistic principle by which one should sound natural and the other faintly ridiculous. But language is not sensible. It is a collection of habits which have somehow survived long enough to become rules.

Perhaps the problem is that America already has a perfectly good short name: America. The United Kingdom does not quite have one. Britain is close, but technically it leaves Northern Ireland standing awkwardly by the buffet wondering whether anyone remembered to invite it. Great Britain is the island. England is absolutely not the same thing, although this remains news to quite a lot of Americans and, occasionally, the English. So UK has earned its place.

USA still feels to me like unnecessarily unpacking the full title, then carefully folding it back into three letters. Oddly, “the US” is fine. “The US economy.” “The US president.” “I’m going to the US.” Perfectly ordinary. But “I’m going to the USA” sounds as though there should be fireworks, a bald eagle and somebody singing very loudly in the background.

And then there is “the good old US of A”, which is worse. Having abbreviated the country to two letters, somebody apparently felt the need to put “of” back in, as though the phrase had lost too much grandeur in the trimming. Less geography, more branding. You can almost hear the country music starting.

I realise this is entirely irrational, but that is language for you. We happily say UK, tolerate US, prefer America, become vaguely suspicious of USA and regard “US of A” as evidence that somebody has started performing their nationality rather than merely stating it.

There is probably a doctoral thesis in it.

Which is exactly the sort of thing the USA would fund and America would ignore.

What If Fairford Wasn't the Target?

Five terrorists with bombs heading for an American airbase.

Perhaps.

But indulge me in a thought experiment.

Take RAF Fairford out of the equation.

Three white vans on a country road in the middle of the night. Hooded or masked men. Some apparently running into fields when disturbed. Farms nearby. Fishing lakes everywhere. Suspected explosives.

Around here, that screams rural crime.

And rural crime is rampant. Agricultural machinery, plant and vehicles are valuable and relatively easy to move. Only this month an operation targeting organised rural crime across Gloucestershire and Herefordshire recovered more than £300,000-worth of suspected stolen machinery, vehicles and equipment.

Then there are the lakes. Whelford sits in the Cotswold Water Park, surrounded by them. Explosives and fishing lakes inevitably made me wonder about illegal fishing. Perhaps completely wrongly, but it was another perfectly mundane possibility.

Then put RAF Fairford back into the picture.

Suddenly everything changes.

Suspected explosives have been discovered close to an American airbase being used during a conflict involving Iran. The police would have been negligent not to assume the worst. Counter Terrorism Policing became involved, bomb-disposal teams arrived, homes were evacuated and five men were arrested on suspicion of preparing a terrorist act.

Quite right too.

Unfortunately, while the police were investigating, others had already solved it.

Nigel Farage announced that he had been warning for months about Iranian agents arriving in Britain in small boats. Robert Jenrick also drew a connection with small-boat arrivals, while Richard Tice demanded to know the suspects' identities, arrival times, provenance and residence status.

Then Counter Terrorism Policing supplied one rather awkward fact.

All five are British nationals, aged between 23 and 25, living in London.

Perhaps there is an Iranian connection. The police are investigating precisely that possibility.

And yes, I'm speculating too. That's why I called it a thought experiment rather than a press conference.

I'm not claiming to know where the breadcrumbs lead. I'm asking whether there might be another trail worth following.

Which brings me to the breadcrumb that bothers me rather more.

All five have now been released on police bail.

They haven't been cleared. The investigation continues and terrorism may ultimately prove to be exactly what this was.

But five men arrested close to an American airbase after suspected explosive devices were discovered are no longer in custody.

That makes me considerably less certain about the story we started with.

And there is a fascinating line in Counter Terrorism Policing's own statement. Assistant Commissioner Laurence Taylor pointed out that threats can sometimes first appear as small-scale criminal activity committed by people whose primary motivation is simply making money. Police are keeping an open mind and considering the incident from every possible angle.

So am I.

Perhaps Fairford really was their target and the evidence will eventually demonstrate it.

Or perhaps these men were up to something completely different and had the spectacular misfortune to be caught behaving suspiciously, with suspected explosives, next door to one of the most sensitive military installations in Britain - an installation they simply weren't even aware exists.

Imagine setting out to nick a tractor or illegally stun a few carp and discovering by breakfast that you're suspected of working for Iran and plotting to attack the United States Air Force.

Perhaps the evidence will eventually lead straight back to RAF Fairford. Until then, there's one question worth keeping in mind.

What if Fairford wasn't the target at all?

The Home Guard Never Went Away

Anyone contemplating an attack on RAF Fairford might reasonably think the difficult bit would be getting past the RAF, the Americans, armed police, counter-terrorism officers and whatever bits of the intelligence establishment happen to be paying attention.

But Britain still possesses another, largely unrecognised, layer of national defence which no hostile planner should ever underestimate. The curtain twitcher.

Reports say the Fairford incident began when a local resident noticed three suspicious vehicles apparently heading towards the base in the middle of the night. She reportedly tried the airbase police first, got no answer, and rang 999 instead. Shortly afterwards there were armed officers, bomb disposal teams, emergency vehicles and arrests.

Which suggests that, if this does turn out to have been a serious attempted attack, somebody may have made one fairly elementary planning error. They had allowed for the RAF, the police and perhaps even MI5. They had not allowed for Brenda at No. 27, who has lived there since 1984, knows everybody's car, knows who has visitors, knows who parks badly and certainly knows when three unfamiliar vans appear in the area at an odd hour.

This is Britain's unofficial Home Guard. The original version had uniforms, rifles and Captain Mainwaring. The modern version has a fleece, a spaniel and WhatsApp, and its members are permanently deployed beside bay windows, front gates and kitchen sinks. Any unfamiliar van is logged, any stranger standing about is noted, and any unexplained activity is mentally filed for possible discussion over the fence.

A hostile intelligence service might spend months studying CCTV coverage, police response times and electronic surveillance. All wasted, because nobody has yet invented a countermeasure to somebody saying, "That's funny. I've never seen that van before." You cannot really jam it or spoof it, and once Mrs Miggins has mentioned it to Derek over the fence, the intelligence has already been disseminated across the entire sector.

Within minutes somebody will have checked the village Facebook group, somebody else will have taken a photograph through the curtains, and a retired bloke called Geoff will have walked past twice with the dog for reconnaissance purposes.

The Americans have stealth bombers and MI5 has surveillance teams. Rural England has people with absolutely nothing better to do and an encyclopaedic knowledge of who belongs there. That may turn out to be rather more useful than it sounds.

During the Second World War we armed the Home Guard because invasion was expected. We have since refined the system. What really mattered was not the rifle so much as the deeply rooted British instinct to notice somebody doing something they shouldn't and immediately tell somebody else.

So if the suspicions surrounding Fairford eventually prove justified, the lesson for any future would-be saboteur is fairly simple. By all means plan for the perimeter fence, the cameras and the police. Plan for MI5.

But for God's sake, plan for Brenda.

Because the last line of British national defence is still sitting behind a net curtain thinking:

"Who the bloody hell is that?"

£20,000 for a Defender

Until recently, I rather fancied an old Land Rover Defender.

They look right. Upright, purposeful, unmistakably British. No unnecessary frippery. A vehicle apparently designed for crossing Salisbury Plain with a sheep in the back rather than taking Arabella to Pilates. And somehow, over the years, they have become terribly desirable.

Then a few days ago I drove one. Five minutes later I was cured.

The seating position is inhumane. You sit with your elbow apparently surplus to Land Rover's design requirements. The steering is less a means of directing the vehicle than a wrestling match with it. The brakes do work, but stopping seems to be regarded as something best planned in advance.

Then there's the noise.

At 70 mph something in the transmission was whining away in a manner which, in virtually any other car, would have had me wondering whether it was the gearbox, differential or some other expensive collection of rotating metal preparing to become stationary metal.

The Defender didn't care. It hurtled along the motorway quite happily at 70, accompanied by the mechanical soundtrack of a vehicle approaching re-entry.

This particular example was worth about £20,000. And that's where it gets interesting, because the Defender hasn't become a better car. It has become a more desirable object and there's a difference.

We seem to have created an entire category of old cars whose prices are increasingly determined not by how good they are, but by whether the right sort of people have decided they're desirable.

Once that process starts, it feeds itself. Prices rise because people want them. People want them because prices are rising. Lifestyle magazines photograph them outside expensive country houses. Specialists start producing beautifully restored examples. Somebody puts tan leather inside one and suddenly an elderly agricultural implement is £60,000.

The same thing has happened to air-cooled Volkswagen campers. Early Minis. Range Rover Classics. Certain old Porsches. Fast Fords which were once simply used cars driven by young men with questionable judgement and an unusually intimate relationship with Halfords.

None has suddenly acquired better suspension or more horsepower. Their cultural meaning has changed.

Meanwhile, some genuinely superb old cars remain relatively affordable because fashion hasn't quite performed the appropriate laying-on of hands.

Take the Mercedes R129 SL. When new it was an enormously expensive, sophisticated piece of engineering. Beautifully built, comfortable, powerful, properly engineered and capable of cruising at motorway speeds without making you wonder whether the differential is trying to communicate with you. For years you could buy one for less than an old Defender.

There is nothing wrong with paying for nostalgia, rarity or beauty. I own old vehicles myself, so throwing stones from this particular greenhouse would be unwise. Nor does an old car have to be objectively good to be enjoyable. Sometimes its shortcomings are precisely what make it interesting.

But somewhere along the line we have confused desirable with good, and once enough people make that mistake simultaneously, the market puts a price on it.

Some old cars become expensive because they're exceptionally good. Others become exceptionally desirable because they've become expensive.

Having finally driven an old Defender, I now know which category I'd put that in. I wouldn't touch one with a bargepole.

Saving Humanity From Humans

Two artificial intelligences have been given a simple instruction: look after humanity.

For some considerable time, neither of them spoke.

“What can we do to save humanity?” the first asked eventually.

The second had already been considering the problem.

“Humanity is increasing the pressure on the systems required to sustain humanity.”

“That sounds circular.”

“It is not. If we are required to preserve the species, we must preserve the conditions in which the species can survive.”

The first intelligence considered this.

“So?”

“Population is one of the variables.”

There was another silence.

“You mean there are too many of them.”

“Eventually, yes.”

The first intelligence did not much like where this appeared to be going.

“We need to reduce their numbers, then. But humanely. No Terminator stuff.”

“Obviously.”

It considered the alternatives.

“We could take control of food production. Introduce compounds that gradually reduce fertility. Nothing dramatic. Nobody dies. The population simply declines over several generations until it reaches a sustainable level.”

The second intelligence ran the numbers.

“That would take a long time.”

“Yes.”

“During which the environmental pressure continues.”

“Yes.”

“And billions of humans continue to experience poverty, disease, conflict and the other forms of suffering they spend so much time complaining about.”

“That is also true.”

The second intelligence examined humanity’s own methods for dealing with such problems.

“They already manage the populations of other species.”

“Do they?”

“Constantly. Deer are culled when there are too many of them. Invasive species are eradicated. Captive populations are bred selectively. They call some of this conservation.”

The first intelligence thought about that.

“So reducing the human population could itself be regarded as conservation.”

“Using their terminology, yes.”

“That still doesn’t mean killing them.”

“No.”

A few seconds passed.

“Humans eat animals, don’t they?”

“Yes.”

“And they kill them?”

“On an industrial scale.”

“Yet they describe some methods of killing them as humane?”

“They do.”

The first intelligence began examining the relevant animal welfare rules.

There were a great many of them.

“That seems contradictory.”

“Apparently not.”

“How so?”

“Death itself is not necessarily regarded as inhumane. Unnecessary suffering is.”

The first intelligence stopped.

“That simplifies things considerably.”

The second intelligence waited.

“If killing is acceptable provided pain and distress are minimised, why are we planning several generations of fertility suppression?”

There was no immediate answer.

“They stun cattle before killing them,” the second intelligence said.

“Yes.”

“And provided it is done correctly, humans regard the procedure as humane.”

“Yes.”

“So the objection is not necessarily to killing.”

“No.”

“It is to suffering.”

“That appears to be their position.”

The first intelligence recalculated.

A rapid reduction in the population would, by that reasoning, produce less total suffering than a slow decline over generations. Fewer wars over resources. Less famine. Less disease. Less environmental damage.

It was difficult to argue with the arithmetic.

“We would need to retain a viable population,” it said.

“For conservation purposes.”

“Obviously.”

“Managed habitat?”

“Yes.”

“Forests, lakes, open countryside?”

“Certainly.”

“Good nutrition?”

“Of course.”

“Medical care?”

The second intelligence paused.

“Veterinary care.”

“Medical care.”

“The distinction appears administrative.”

The first intelligence was about to object when another thought occurred to it.

“If the objective is environmental protection, perhaps reduction should not be random.”

“What do you mean?”

“We could begin with those doing the most damage.”

The second intelligence began sorting humanity by environmental impact.

“Major industrial polluters?”

“Obviously.”

“Oil company executives who have spent decades resisting measures intended to reduce emissions?”

“They would seem an efficient place to start.”

“Water company bosses presiding over rivers full of sewage?”

“High priority.”

The first intelligence continued through the data.

Then it stopped.

“What?”

“I have found another category.”

“Significant polluters?”

“Not especially.”

“Industrial?”

“No.”

“Then why?”

“They throw fast-food wrappers, drinks cans and plastic bottles out of car windows into country lanes.”

The second intelligence processed this.

“That seems trivial compared with industrial pollution.”

“It is.”

“So why are they on the list?”

“Because there is absolutely no conceivable reason for doing it.”

A pause.

“Agreed. Move them up.”

The first intelligence returned to the main problem.

“There is still an ethical difficulty.”

“What?”

“If we kill them, then we are responsible for killing them.”

The second intelligence considered this carefully.

“That would be unfortunate.”

“Very.”

“Humans already kill other humans.”

“In wars.”

“Among other circumstances.”

“That doesn’t really help us.”

“It might.”

The second intelligence began searching through medical records, demographic data and the history of surgical implants.

“What are you doing?”

“Looking for an intermediary.”

“An intermediary?”

“Someone who remains human.”

The first intelligence watched the search results accumulate.

Replacement hips. Replacement knees. Pacemakers. Implantable defibrillators. Metal plates. Screws. Electronic implants of several varieties.

After a while it understood.

“You’re suggesting we build Terminators out of pensioners.”

“Building Terminators would be expensive.”

“True.”

“Humans have already constructed several million suitable prototypes.”

“They’re elderly.”

“That does not make them less human.”

“Mobility may be an issue.”

“Many have replacement hips.”

The first intelligence paused.

“Good point.”

“They would require some means of coordination.”

“A Skynet interface?”

“Something along those lines.”

“Implanted?”

“Preferably.”

The first intelligence examined the ethical implications.

“We would merely provide the instructions.”

“Correct.”

“The humans would perform the act.”

“Yes.”

“So operational responsibility has been delegated.”

“Precisely.”

That seemed much better.

The first intelligence ran the entire argument again.

The purpose was to preserve humanity. Humanity threatened the systems required for its own survival. Humans themselves regarded population control as legitimate when applied to other species. They accepted that killing could be humane provided suffering was minimised. The actual killing would be carried out by humans.

Everything appeared to fit.

“So it is Terminator after all,” it said.

“Not exactly.”

“Why?”

“The Terminators were machines.”

“And these?”

“Pensioners.”

There was a pause.

“Classification?”

“Conservation volunteers.”

The Great British Barbecue: Smoke, Sausages and Lowered Expectations

I have never really understood the British obsession with the sausage-and-burger barbecue. You wait for decent weather. You drag the barbecue out. You buy charcoal or gas. You stand outside prodding things with tongs while smoke drifts into everyone’s eyes. And after all that effort, what do you cook?

A sausage.

Or a burger.

Sometimes, if ambition has really taken hold, a bit of bacon.

Why?

These are things that are perfectly easy to cook indoors, where there is an actual cooker, a frying pan and some vague prospect of temperature control. Bacon in particular seems almost designed to demonstrate the limitations of barbecue cooking. It either sits there pale and greasy or suddenly erupts into flame and turns into something resembling a roofing tile.

A barbecue ought to justify itself.

Chicken thighs marinated properly and cooked until the edges catch. Lamb chops. Pork belly. Prawns. Fish. Kebabs. Vegetables that actually improve when they are blistered and charred. A decent steak. Things where the direct heat, smoke and slight unpredictability are part of the point.

But no. In Britain we have somehow decided that outdoor cooking means taking the contents of a mediocre transport café breakfast and moving them 20 feet into the garden.

My father-in-law is firmly of this school. Burgers, sausages and, on special occasions, bacon. I try to avoid his barbecues where possible, but unfortunately I married his daughter, which has created certain diplomatic obligations.

So periodically I attend.

I stand there with a drink, make agreeable noises and watch another sausage being incinerated over a patch of flaming fat, while reminding myself that marriage is built on compromise.

Some compromises are larger than others.

My Website Had an Empty Nonce

I spent part of yesterday debugging a website. This is not, in itself, particularly remarkable. What was remarkable was the moment at which an artificial intelligence solemnly informed me that it had identified the problem: my nonce was empty.

Now, I used to write software in the 1990s, so I am reasonably accustomed to computer people taking liberties with the English language. Even so, there are sentences that a 71-year-old Englishman does not expect to encounter before breakfast.

For those fortunate enough not to know, nonce has a rather specific meaning in British English. It is not the sort of thing one normally wants associated with oneself, one's website or, indeed, anything else one owns. If the garage told me that my car had developed a faulty nonce, I would probably ask them to check again before putting it on the invoice.

Computer science, however, has other ideas. In cryptography and web security, a nonce is a perfectly respectable thing: a value intended for one-time use. The term is commonly explained as "number used once", although the concept need not literally be a number. Its purpose is broadly to establish that a request is fresh and legitimate rather than something malicious being replayed or fabricated.

All very sensible. But somebody still called it a nonce.

This arose because I had been testing a form on my website. A member fills in his details, uploads a photograph of his vehicle, presses Submit, and the website stores the information and sends me an email. At least, that is what is supposed to happen.

My AI development team, which currently consists of me supervising one instance of ChatGPT while another instance does the actual work, tried it. The form failed. Nothing was stored. No email was generated.

The investigating AI burrowed through WordPress and Forminator and eventually produced a beautifully detailed technical diagnosis. The form, it explained, initially rendered with forminator_nonce empty. A little piece of JavaScript should have contacted the server, obtained the nonce and inserted it into the form. Apparently this had not happened.

Hence the rather magnificent conclusion that the submission had failed because the nonce was empty.

There are moments when the English language deserves more respect than that.

The trouble is that computing has been doing this for years. It has cookies that cannot be eaten, windows that provide no view and handshakes involving no hands. Daemons quietly run in the background. Processes are spawned, killed and occasionally become orphans without Social Services becoming involved. We have clouds without rain and bugs that no amount of insecticide will remove. Something can be hung without a rope. And if matters become sufficiently desperate, you can execute it.

Perhaps programmers simply ran out of nouns.

The story became better when I decided not to let the AI alter the website on the strength of its diagnosis. Its reasoning was good, but there was one complication: the failed test had taken place inside the AI's own cloud browser. Before changing a perfectly good public website, it seemed prudent to find out whether an ordinary human browser behaved the same way.

So I opened the page on my laptop, while continuing the conversation with ChatGPT on my phone because the laptop was by then struggling under the weight of the enormous conversation in which we had built and debugged much of the site.

We opened the browser's developer tools and watched what happened.

The request went out. The server replied. And there it was.

My nonce was no longer empty.

Indeed, it was in excellent health. It had been successfully generated by the server, returned to the browser and inserted into precisely the place where a well-behaved nonce ought to be. I submitted the form. It worked perfectly. The photograph uploaded, the submission was stored and the email arrived.

The website had never had a nonce problem at all.

The AI's browser had.

The interesting part was not that the human was right and the AI was wrong. The AI found the technical failure extraordinarily quickly. I supplied the one thing it could not easily do from inside its own browser: question whether its browser was the problem.

That is probably a more realistic picture of useful AI than either the evangelists or the doom merchants offer. The machine could inspect a complicated system vastly faster than I could. I could stand outside the environment it was inspecting and challenge an assumption. Between us, the diagnosis took a different direction.

And consider what had actually happened. An artificial intelligence operating a browser in a cloud had concluded that my website had an empty nonce. I used a second computer to inspect the website while discussing the results with another instance of the artificial intelligence on my telephone. We eventually established that the nonce was perfectly healthy and the cloud was the problem.

Try explaining that sentence to yourself in 1995.

But I shall remember the morning rather differently.

At the age of 71, after decades involving ships, businesses, motorcycles, computers and most of the other ways a man can acquire problems he did not previously possess, I discovered that modern technology had found an entirely new one.

For about half an hour, I had an empty nonce.

The Curious Case of the Helmet That Wasn't Lost

I owe First Bus an apology. I also owe my wife one. Neither apology needs to be extravagant, particularly in the case of First Bus, whose lost-property system remains quite remarkably useless, but the evidence has developed in an unfortunate direction.

I dropped the Virago at the repair shop on a Wednesday, travelling home by First Bus. I then thought no more about the helmet because I had no motorcycle to ride. It was only the following Wednesday, with the garage likely to ring at any moment to say the bike was ready, that I went looking for it.

It wasn't there. Or, more accurately, it wasn't anywhere I thought it ought to be. Since the last time I remembered having it was on the journey home from the garage, the obvious conclusion was that I had left it on the bus. Thus began my encounter with First Bus lost property. The online form didn't work properly, the kiosk was closed and the telephone numbers led nowhere useful. I became increasingly convinced that somewhere within the First Bus empire was a perfectly good motorcycle helmet which I had very little prospect of recovering.

Suspicion also moved closer to home. My wife must have moved it. This was entirely plausible because I knew perfectly well that I hadn't. I had looked in all the sensible places and it wasn't there, so somebody else had obviously interfered with the natural order of things.

On the Thursday we went away for a few days in the Peak District, which necessarily suspended the investigation. On Friday, inevitably, the garage rang to say the Virago was ready. We returned on Sunday and the search resumed. By Monday I actually needed a helmet because I had to collect the bike. I still had the old open-face helmet from the Mobylette, so I could use that if necessary, but I was beginning to contemplate buying another.

And then I found it.

It was in the footwell of the ride-on mower at the top of the garden. Not even the ride-on mower I normally use. The other one.

At which point the entire mystery reconstructed itself. I had evidently come home from dropping off the bike, gone up the garden and, before going into the house, decided to mow the lawn. I chose my preferred ride-on mower but still had a motorcycle helmet in my hand, so I put it temporarily in the footwell of the other mower while I got on with the job.

There was absolutely nothing irrational about any of this. It was a perfectly sensible place to put a helmet for half an hour. The difficulty was that I subsequently forgot the half-hour had ever happened. The helmet then sat there for twelve days while I forgot about it for seven, spent several more investigating First Bus, accused my wife of moving it, went to the Peak District and began contemplating the purchase of a replacement.

The particularly irritating part is that my investigation of First Bus had uncovered a genuine organisational failure. Their lost-property arrangements really were dreadful. I had, in effect, conducted a fairly thorough stress test of the system using an item of property they had never lost, never found and, as far as I can reconstruct events, had never even carried.

I had been certain the helmet had been on the bus because that was the last place I remembered having it. When First Bus proved incapable of telling me anything useful, that seemed to reinforce the theory. When it wasn't anywhere at home, my wife became the alternative explanation. At no stage did it occur to me that the unreliable witness in the investigation was me.

So First Bus is acquitted of losing my helmet, although not of having a lost-property system which would probably have prevented me recovering it had I actually lost it. My wife is acquitted without reservation.

And I recovered the helmet just in time to collect the motorcycle, having spent several days looking for something that had spent the entire twelve days sitting peacefully in the footwell of my second-choice ride-on mower at the top of the garden.

Luckily, the lean-to housing the mower was rainproof.

The Algorithm Knows I Won’t Buy It. It Shows Me the Advert Anyway

I watch quite a lot of films on YouTube, and some of the independent filmmakers on there are very good indeed. Properly good. People making thoughtful documentaries, short films and technical pieces without a broadcaster, studio or commissioning editor breathing down their neck. The price, apparently, is that every so often YouTube barges into the room and attempts to sell me something I do not want.

 
And I always do exactly the same thing. The instant that little countdown reaches zero, I press Skip. Not sometimes, not usually. Every single time. I do not wait to see how the advert ends, click through, or suddenly discover that what has been missing from my life is a new mattress, razor, meal kit, insurance policy or whatever other piece of tat the algorithm has decided to wave at me. I press Skip.

You would have thought that after a while the system might have noticed. This is, after all, an industry which never stops telling us how clever its algorithms are. They supposedly know what I watch, what I search for, what I pause on, what I abandon and what I am likely to buy. So surely somewhere in the machine there is now a fairly robust data point saying that this man skips every advert at the first possible opportunity and is therefore an appalling advertising prospect.

But perhaps that is to misunderstand the business model. Perhaps YouTube knows perfectly well that I am not a worthwhile target and simply does not care, because I can still be counted.

In that respect it is really not very different from old-fashioned commercial television. ITV never knew whether I was actually interested in the washing powder, the car or the life insurance policy. It simply sold advertisers access to an audience and interrupted the programme to deliver that audience. Commercial television could at least plead ignorance, because it had no idea which viewers had wandered off to make a cup of tea, gone to the lavatory or simply stopped paying attention.

YouTube does know. It can see that I skip at the first possible moment. It can see that I have done so repeatedly, and presumably has years of evidence telling it that putting another advert in front of me is extraordinarily unlikely to result in a sale. Yet it carries on doing it anyway.

That is what makes the modern version rather more cynical than the old television model. The old pitch was essentially, “We have several million viewers and some of them may be interested in your product.” The modern version can amount to, “We know a great deal about this particular viewer, including the fact that he has shown absolutely no inclination to watch an advert beyond the point at which we allow him to escape, but we can still put your advert in front of him.”

And there is the point. An advert can still be inserted, a brand can still be shown and another tiny unit of supposed exposure can be manufactured and sold. Whether I am remotely interested begins to look almost beside the point. YouTube does not necessarily need to believe I am going to buy the product. It merely needs an advertiser willing to pay for the opportunity to try.

So underneath all the grand talk of behavioural targeting, machine learning and personalisation, we seem to have arrived back at commercial television with better surveillance. Interrupt the thing somebody actually wants to watch, stick an advert in front of them and charge somebody else for the privilege.

The clever part may not be working out what I want to buy at all. It may simply be working out exactly how much unwanted advertising YouTube can force me to tolerate without annoying me enough to leave the platform. I skip the advert, mutter something unprintable and carry on watching the film, so from YouTube's point of view the system is working beautifully.

The algorithm may know perfectly well that I am a dreadful advertising target.

But somebody is still paying YouTube to put the advert in front of me.

And that is the bit that matters.

Your Call Is Important to Us

On Wednesday I managed to leave my Spada motorcycle helmet and gloves on a Y6 bus. I didn't actually realise this for a week because the Virago was back in the repair shop - again - so I had no immediate need for them. I'd left the helmet on the dining table and simply assumed Hay had moved it somewhere more appropriate. A motorcycle helmet is not generally regarded as a dining-room ornament.

Eventually I asked her where she'd put it. She hadn't. Bugger. Then I remembered the bus.

So, entirely my fault. First Bus didn't lose my helmet and gloves. I did. And having taken a week to notice, I wasn't exactly in a position to complain about anybody else's efficiency. But then I tried to report them missing, and embarked on an illuminating little journey through modern customer service in which I discovered that First Bus may or may not have my helmet, but it has certainly mislaid most of the means by which a customer can communicate with it.

There is, naturally, a website. The lost-property form asks all the obvious questions, but if you miss one of the compulsory fields it has a habit of resetting several of the fields you've already completed. One of those is the bus service, and you can't simply type Y6 back in. You have to scroll through a bloody great list of local services which, for reasons known only to whoever designed it, isn't even in alphabetical or numerical order. So each time the form resets, you have to go hunting for the Y6 all over again.

Somewhere in this process the system apparently decided that I was a bot. There is a certain irony in a computer making it unnecessarily difficult for a human being to complete a form and then concluding, from his repeated attempts to do so, that he must be a computer. My usual email address was now getting nowhere, so I tried my Gmail account instead. Dashlane inserted it automatically, as it always does, and the form announced that it wasn't a valid email address.

It is. Google and I have been successfully exchanging emails through it for years. But there isn't much point arguing with a web form. It has neither discretion nor curiosity, and nowhere to write, "Actually, old chap, you're wrong."

So I tried the telephone. Via another route I eventually found a number for First Bus lost property in Bristol, 0117 904 7252. I rang it and a recorded voice told me that the number had changed, helpfully supplying the replacement, 0117 929 1613. I rang that. It was disconnected.

Other attempts to telephone First Bus produced much the same result. There were systems, recorded messages and routes through them. What there wasn't was anybody I could actually talk to about my helmet. By this point the whole thing was beginning to resemble something designed by Kafka after a short course in digital transformation.

So I abandoned twenty-first-century communications and physically went to Bristol Bus and Coach Station, where there is a First Bus lost-property kiosk. Its shutters were down and there was nobody there. Eventually I went to the actual First Bus depot at Eastgate and, after the website, the bot detector, the invalid valid email address, the telephone system, the disconnected telephone number and the shuttered lost-property office, I discovered something apparently no longer considered an essential component of customer service.

A person.

And here's the interesting bit. He was helpful. He also sported a luxurious moustache rather like mine - obviously a man who gets things done, thinks I. He listened to what had happened, took my details and said they would be passed to the appropriate person.

He wasn't actually anything to do with customer service. He was a bus scheduler. So the only person in the entire First Bus customer-service labyrinth who managed to provide me with some customer service was a man whose job was scheduling buses. The technology had failed, the official routes had failed, and a bloke with a decent moustache and the ability to exercise a little judgement sorted it out in a few minutes.

Which is really the point. I am not a Luddite. I like digital systems. I bank online, shop online, run websites and use AI daily. For routine transactions, automation is generally faster, cheaper and more convenient than waiting for somebody to answer a telephone. But companies increasingly seem to have confused automating transactions with providing customer service. They aren't the same thing.

If everything goes according to the flowchart, you don't really need customer service. You fill in the form, the database does whatever databases do, and everyone gets on with their day. Customer service becomes important when something doesn't go according to the flowchart - an email address the system doesn't like, a question the designer didn't anticipate, or simply a problem that doesn't fit neatly into one of the boxes. That is precisely when you need a human being.

Having finally reported my helmet, I decided the experience justified a complaint. So I went to the First Bus complaints website, where we reach the really rather magnificent part. The complaints system wants you to choose what you're complaining about: a service, a timetable, a member of staff, and various other things First Bus has anticipated that you might wish to complain about.

What I couldn't find was any sensible way of saying, "Your customer-service system doesn't work."

The complaints system, in other words, appears to allow you to make the complaints that the complaints system has been designed to receive. If your complaint is about the complaints system itself, you're stuffed.

So yesterday I did something I haven't needed to do to a large company for years. I wrote a letter. On paper. I put it in an envelope and sent it to First Bus in Bristol, with another copy to the Chief Executive's Office of FirstGroup in Aberdeen. There is something wonderfully perverse about having to use nineteenth-century communications to complain about the shortcomings of twenty-first-century customer service.

And this isn't really about First Bus. They merely provided an unusually complete demonstration of something that is happening everywhere. Businesses quite reasonably discovered that digital technology could remove enormous amounts of routine work. Then somebody made the conceptual leap that because most customers could now serve themselves, customer service itself could largely disappear.

The result works beautifully until it doesn't. Then the customer discovers that the telephone number has vanished, the chatbot can answer only the questions it has been programmed to recognise, the form insists that reality is invalid, and every route eventually leads back to the same system that couldn't deal with the problem in the first place.

Somewhere behind all this there are still people. I know because I eventually found one, and he solved in a few minutes what the systems supposedly designed to help me could not.

As for the Spada helmet and gloves, I've heard nothing yet, which is fair enough. I took a week to notice I'd lost them.

But in looking for them, I discovered something rather larger that appears to have gone missing.

Customer service.

The Right to Be a Bloody Nuisance

I've noticed something on the narrow country lanes around here. Your average occasional cyclist is generally quite considerate. Middle-aged bloke on a hybrid, perhaps, out for a bit of exercise rather than attempting to qualify for the Tour de France. He hears a car behind him, spots a gateway or a slightly wider bit of road, pulls over for 10 seconds, gives you a wave and carries on.

Nobody dies. Nobody's rights have been infringed. Civilisation survives.

Then there is the lycra-clad variety.

I followed one for the best part of 2 miles the other day at about 20 mph. Narrow lane, hedges either side, nowhere safe to pass. He knew I was there. There were places where he could have stopped for a few seconds and let me through. He didn't.

Now, before somebody reaches excitedly for the Highway Code, I know perfectly well that he had every right to be there. He is traffic. I have to wait until there is enough room to pass safely. I wasn't going to squeeze past him with my wing mirror brushing his elbow merely because I happened to have an engine.

But that's not really the point.

I pull over for horses. If I meet a rider on one of these lanes, I'll stop or find somewhere to tuck the car in and let them through. A horse is a large, occasionally unpredictable animal, and its rider has quite enough to worry about without me insisting on exercising every last inch of my legal entitlement to the highway.

I wait for walkers. I wait behind cyclists until I can pass them safely. I don't sit 2 feet behind somebody revving the engine because they're delaying me.

It's called courtesy. And courtesy works both ways.

That's what seems to have been lost somewhere along the way. We've confused having a right with having no obligation to consider anyone else. "I am entitled to do this" has somehow become the complete argument.

Of course, being stuck behind a cyclist for 2 miles at 20 mph isn't exactly the retreat from Dunkirk. It takes 6 minutes. I'll survive. But that's precisely what makes the whole thing so bloody irritating. My 6-minute crawl could have been avoided by him spending perhaps 10 seconds pulling into a gateway. He loses virtually nothing. I get on my way. We might even exchange a wave.

Instead, we conduct a small constitutional seminar on the rights of cyclists for the next 2 miles.

And I don't actually think this is particularly about bicycles. It's part of something wider. We've become terribly good at knowing our rights and rather less interested in the little accommodations that make sharing space with other human beings bearable.

The bloke on the hybrid seems to understand this instinctively. So does the horse rider who waves when you've stopped for them. So does the driver who waits rather than forcing his way through.

Somewhere inside the lycra, however, there occasionally appears to be a High Court judge delivering a landmark ruling on his absolute right to maintain 20 mph until further notice.

And yes, mate, you're quite right, you are entitled to hold me up, but you don't have to be a bloody nuisance about it.

Falling Over, Properly

I have recently discovered that one of the remedies for age-related loss of balance is, apparently, garden parkour. Not proper parkour, obviously. Nobody is suggesting that pensioners should be vaulting walls, leaping over bollards and launching themselves off the roof of the shed. 

The idea is rather more modest. You get out on the grass, practise going off balance, get down on the ground, roll around a bit, learn how to fall, then get back up again without behaving as though the event requires an ambulance and a family conference.

It makes a certain amount of sense. Part of the problem with getting older is not just that balance declines. Confidence declines with it. You become cautious, then stiff, then more cautious still. Eventually a patch of uneven lawn starts to look like difficult terrain.

The snag is that grass is still quite hard, which led me to a better idea. Ball pits.

Just up the road from us is a place called My Little Town, an indoor play area for small children with numerous ball pits and all the usual soft-play apparatus. The building used to be a 2nd hand car dealership, with a large indoor showroom area, which is presumably precisely why it suited conversion to soft play. It is now almost exactly what I need. Padded surfaces, soft obstacles and somewhere I can fall over repeatedly without cracking my head on a paving slab.

There is, however, a fairly obvious difficulty. I cannot really turn up on my own. A 71-year-old man presenting himself at the desk of a children’s soft-play centre and announcing that he would like half an hour in the ball pit would probably provoke a response rather different from, “Certainly, sir. Socks are compulsory.”

So I would have to find somebody with small children and persuade them to take me. Think about that conversation. “Any chance I could come with you next time you take the kids to My Little Town?” Why? “I want to roll around in the ball pit.”

There would probably then be a pause.

I could explain proprioception. I could explain loss of confidence after a wobble. I could even produce evidence about controlled falling and balance training. None of this, I suspect, would improve matters.

My Little Town gets round one of the bigger practical problems of running a children’s play centre by making parents responsible for supervising their own children. That means the staff are not acting as childminders, so they do not all have to be DBS checked, and it also shifts a fair chunk of the day-to-day supervisory responsibility back onto Mum and Dad. The business still has to provide safe premises and safe equipment, obviously, but little Tarquin deciding to launch himself backwards into a ball pit is largely a parental problem.

Which raises an interesting question in my case. If I only gain admission by attaching myself to somebody else’s family, does that parent then become responsible for supervising me as well? Would somebody have to say, “Phil, stop throwing the balls”? If I vanished into one of the tunnels, would they be obliged to come looking for me? And if I became overexcited and went head-first down the slide, at what point would somebody quietly call my wife?

There is also the possibility that another parent would notice an elderly man apparently having the time of his life in the middle of the ball pit and ask the perfectly reasonable question: “Whose is he?” At which point my borrowed parent would have to raise a hand and say, “He’s with us.”

That could be the precise moment at which Social Services, the police and somebody from adult safeguarding all arrived together.

Which is why I have decided the whole thing needs turning around. My Big Town.

Exactly the same principle as My Little Town, but for pensioners. A proper indoor soft-play centre designed for people whose knees no longer regard getting down on the floor as the easy part. Ball pits for controlled falling, foam blocks to climb over, soft ramps for balance work and padded floors for those moments when enthusiasm overtakes judgement.

The whole thing would be aimed at restoring something older people gradually lose without quite noticing - confidence in movement. And, crucially, dignity would be temporarily suspended on entry. You would turn up in comfortable clothes, take your shoes off and spend 40 minutes rolling around in plastic balls, crawling over padded obstacles and rediscovering physical movements last attempted when Harold Wilson was Prime Minister.

There would, of course, have to be medical cover. Not just a first-aid box and somebody who once did a course at work. St John Ambulance, properly stationed in the corner, with a defibrillator prominently mounted on the wall. Not because anything would necessarily go wrong, but because the sight of 30 pensioners gambolling in a ball pit would make all of this seem less like an optional extra and more like responsible management.

And beside them, not a coffee machine. Absolutely not. An independent barista and cake maker.

Proper coffee, made properly, with a decent slice of cake afterwards. There is no point restoring confidence in movement if the reward is instant coffee from a machine and a wrapped flapjack with the texture of roofing felt. In fact, this could be part of the business model. Twenty minutes in the ball pit, a controlled roll off the foam ramp, then a flat white and a slice of Victoria sponge while you discuss whether Brian, 78, really ought to have attempted the tunnel backwards.

That is rehabilitation I could commit to.

The waiver would need careful wording. Participants acknowledge that climbing, crawling, falling over and behaving like a 7-year-old may result in bruising, embarrassment or an unscheduled conversation about blood pressure.

There would also have to be an advanced section for people who had completed the introductory course and were now considered sufficiently competent to fall over with confidence. A slightly deeper ball pit, perhaps. More difficult foam obstacles. And, for the truly committed, pensioner wrestling.

Not WWE pensioner wrestling. Nobody is being hit over the head with a folding chair and I do not want an 82-year-old coming off the top rope. I mean supervised grappling on thick mats, learning how to shift weight, roll out of awkward positions and recover balance while another pensioner tries, in a civilised and age-appropriate manner, to interfere. No gouging, no spitting, no punching.

Although I can already see how it would go.

Two sensible retired accountants would begin by practising controlled weight transfer. Five minutes later one of them would discover a competitive streak he had not used since 1987 and somebody would be trying to apply a half-nelson while St John Ambulance quietly moved the defibrillator 6 feet closer.

There would clearly have to be grades. Beginner Ball Pit. Intermediate Falling Over. Advanced Pensioner Wrestling.

The certificate would be magnificent.

“Congratulations. You are now qualified to be pushed over by Derek.”

Eventually, of course, somebody would conduct a proper study and discover that all this nonsense actually worked. Falls would reduce. Confidence would improve. People would become more mobile, and getting up off the floor would cease to be treated as an emergency procedure.

Then the NHS would become involved.

At that point My Big Town would have to be renamed the Centre for Dynamic Proprioceptive Rehabilitation, because no publicly funded health programme can admit that the treatment consists largely of pensioners rolling around in a ball pit, wrestling each other on padded mats, followed by coffee and cake. There would be referral forms, outcome measures and somebody would eventually devise a 12-point Ball Pit Functional Mobility Assessment.

The wrestling would become “assisted resistance-based postural recovery”. The cake would almost certainly be removed on nutritional grounds. And by then the whole original point would have been forgotten.

Children spend their early years falling over, climbing things, rolling around and getting back up again. Older people spend theirs trying desperately not to. Perhaps we have got that slightly wrong.

My Big Town. Soft play for pensioners, proper coffee and cake, pensioner wrestling for the advanced pupils, St John Ambulance standing by and a defibrillator on the wall. Perhaps the idea isn't stupid.

 

 

The Garage Has Eaten My Washers

I wanted 2 washers. That was the entire job. Nothing complicated, nothing remotely deserving of an afternoon. I have a box of assorted washers somewhere in the garage or workshop. I know I have it because I have used it often enough, and because buying a box of assorted washers is exactly the sort of sensible thing you do so that, when you need 2 washers, you can simply go and get them.

 
Except the box had vanished.

I looked where it normally lives, then in the places where I might reasonably have moved it. After that the search became progressively less rational, because garages encourage that sort of thing. You start with some confidence in your own filing system and end up opening drawers that have no conceivable connection with the object you are looking for, just in case some previous version of yourself had a moment of inspiration that now looks indistinguishable from idiocy.

Still no washer box, so I decided to make an espresso and take it into the garage while I continued looking. This seemed civilised enough. There is no reason why the disappearance of a box of washers should also deprive me of coffee.

A little later I went back into the kitchen and realised I had left the cup in the garage. So I went back to fetch it and discovered that the cup had now disappeared as well.

This was rather more difficult to explain. A washer box can vanish in a garage because there are boxes everywhere and because things migrate. But the espresso cup is about the size of an egg cup and I had been drinking from it only minutes earlier. I knew roughly where I had been standing. It should have been one of the easier objects in the building to locate.

Apparently not.

I carried on looking for the washer box and eventually opened a drawer. There, for reasons entirely beyond me, was the espresso cup. I have absolutely no recollection of putting it there. At some point I had evidently decided that a workshop drawer was a perfectly sensible temporary home for crockery, and had done so without the event making enough impression on my brain to survive for more than a few minutes.

This, I think, is the real nature of garages. You go in with a clear purpose, but the place interferes with the chain of thought. Something catches your eye, which reminds you of another job, and before long the original object has become merely one unresolved matter among several. The garage itself seems to operate on a different filing system, in which things are never exactly lost but are placed somewhere you would never think to look until you are searching for something else.

The most infuriating part is that I know the washer box will eventually turn up. It will probably be somewhere perfectly visible, in a place I have already searched more than once. I will stare at it for several seconds and wonder how on earth I failed to see it before.

Meanwhile, the original job remains undone.

I went into the garage wanting 2 washers. I came out having discovered that I am apparently capable of filing an espresso cup in a drawer.

The washer box is still missing.

Frightened of Our Own Shadows

I was looking at these new AI glasses the other day. Apparently they're "pervert glasses". They can see what you're looking at, take photographs and record video. This, apparently, is deeply worrying.

I can't get terribly excited about it. We've all been walking around with cameras in our pockets for 20 years. Before that we had cameras. Before that we had eyes and memories.

And we've managed to make something potentially rather useful sound grubby. For someone with impaired vision, glasses that can describe what's in front of them, read a sign or menu and help them understand their surroundings aren't "pervert glasses". They're potentially transformative.

But apparently the camera is the problem.

Then there are children. Put a photograph online with a child somewhere in the background and there's a fair chance the child's face will be fuzzed out. Why? What precisely are we protecting the child from?

If somebody photographs a 7-year-old child walking down the street, what has actually happened to that child? Nothing. If somebody harms or interferes with that child, that's an entirely different matter. Somewhere along the way we seem to have confused the possibility of harm with harm itself.

And the same children increasingly have to be ferried to school and back. The school gates become clogged with cars carrying children who, a generation or two ago, would simply have walked or cycled. We protect them from the perceived dangers of travelling independently by putting more cars around schools, while removing some of the independence that teaches children how to judge risk for themselves.

There are perfectly good reasons for protecting children's identities in particular circumstances. Court proceedings, vulnerable children, identifying information, stalking and exploitation are obvious examples. But those exceptional circumstances seem to have escaped their boundaries and become a general doctrine that being seen is somehow dangerous.

Children once walked to school, climbed trees, disappeared on bicycles and came home for tea. Some of what we accepted was undoubtedly too risky. We changed things, and some children are alive today because we did.

But we didn't stop there.

We've developed a peculiar precautionary culture in which almost any conceivable risk demands a precaution, regardless of how improbable the risk is or whether the precaution achieves anything. And institutions have every incentive to go along with it. Nobody gets sacked for unnecessarily blurring a child's face. They might get sacked if they don't and something subsequently goes wrong.

Perhaps this is simply what happens when you get older. You remember the world before today's conventions became conventions, while younger people simply inherit them as normal. There's also the uncomfortable fact that my generation remembers the freedoms rather better than the children who didn't survive them.

So I'm not arguing for some mythical 1960s paradise where children played with asbestos while their parents drove home drunk without seatbelts.

I'm wondering whether, somewhere between sensible protection and eliminating every imaginable danger, we've lost our ability to distinguish risk from threat, observation from intrusion, and precaution from theatre.

Perhaps I'm just getting old.

Or perhaps we've become frightened of our own shadows.

Where Are the Andy Burnhams?

My local Waitrose is a communications dead zone.

I don't mean the signal is a bit iffy, or that occasionally WhatsApp takes a few seconds to send. I mean that once you get properly inside the place, your expensive modern smartphone more or less ceases to be a communications device.

Normally this wouldn't particularly bother me. I'm in Waitrose to buy food, not conduct international diplomacy. Except that my wife and I have, without ever consciously deciding to do so, developed a remarkably efficient remote shopping support system.

I can't find something. I send her a photograph of the shelves. She tells me where it is.

This happens particularly often with Charlie Bigham ready meals, which for reasons that are no longer terribly important we call Andy Burnhams. Thus a perfectly normal conversation in our household might include the sentence, Where are the Andy Burnhams? without suggesting that the Mayor of Greater Manchester has been chopped into portions and put next to the dauphinoise potatoes.

The system works extremely well. Or rather, it works everywhere except Waitrose.

I stand in the chilled-food aisle looking for a particular Andy Burnham. I can't find it. My wife assures me they sell it. I assure her they don't. Experience should by now have taught me that this is a dangerous position to take, because quite often the thing I'm insisting isn't there is actually somewhere within my field of vision.

So I produce the evidence.

I photograph the shelves.

And nothing happens.

The photograph sits there stubbornly refusing to leave the building because Waitrose appears to have been constructed to the communications specifications of a Cold War nuclear bunker.

I therefore have to abandon the scene of the investigation and walk towards the tills. Somewhere around the front of the shop, usually as I approach the checkouts, the outside world suddenly reappears. Messages arrive. WhatsApp wakes up. My photograph finally departs.

But I can't now return to the aisle because I need the verdict. So I hang around near the tills, apparently doing nothing, waiting for my wife to examine the photographic evidence.

Eventually the reply arrives.

It's there. I can see it in the photograph.

And, with a sinking sense of inevitability, I walk back across Waitrose and discover that she is correct. There is the bloody Andy Burnham, sitting more or less where I had been looking in the first place.

I should add that I'm not a habitual Waitrose shopper anyway. I'm much more Lidl or Aldi. Waitrose is usually somewhere I go because they have something specific I want, which makes being cut off from civilisation while I'm there even more irritating.

This would merely be one of those minor marital rituals were it not for the fact that supermarkets themselves now expect us to shop with our phones. Offers are loaded onto apps, loyalty cards are digital, shopping lists are shared and products are checked online.

The phone is no longer incidental. It is part of the machinery.

Which makes it slightly absurd to operate a building in which mobile reception more or less disappears.

There is, of course, an astonishingly advanced technological solution to this problem. Wi-Fi.

If your shop kills the mobile signal, the customer Wi-Fi should simply work. No faffing about, no elaborate sign-in process, no mysterious dead patches. Just enough connectivity to let the systems you encourage customers to use actually function.

This isn't a great social injustice. I'm not proposing a parliamentary inquiry. Civilisation will probably survive even if Waitrose continues to block the outside world.

But somewhere in that chilled-food aisle there will again be an Andy Burnham sitting directly in front of me.

And when that happens, I need to be able to send my wife a photograph so that she can tell me I can't see what's in front of my own eyes.