8.8.88

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'Now, who can tell me today's date?'  I remember the teacher standing in front of the class; a female teacher, so perhaps it was Miss Pinkney or Mrs Sutcliffe - but not Miss Grogden or Mrs Day.  I am at the back of the class to the right, next to Angela - but this may have been the following year.  I half remember sitting next to my best friend, Neil Campion, at some stage, which must have been around this time, towards the end of my infant schooldays.  Perhaps he sat in front of me.  I suppose I should be amazed at how easily I lost touch with him.  I never saw him again, though I do remember being told how his brother - who had a withered left arm with a rather disturbing hook-like device he clipped over it - was killed a couple of years later when he rode his motorbike into an unlit skip late at night.  Apparently his girlfriend riding pillion was also killed, but none of this touched me in the slightest.

'And what is special about today's date?'  Our double desk - whoever it was that shared with me - consisted of a top with a kind of rectangular cavity underneath.  In it we would keep all our text and exercise books, along with pencils and rubbers and set squares and the like.  I remember that I arranged mine in two neat ziggurat forms, one in each corner.

'And when will be the next time that that happens?'  Outside, in the sunlight, lay the grass playing area bounded by a high wire netting fence.  At the far end this gave on to the forbidden sports fields of the secondary modern school next door.  I never knew anything about this place, except that it was where most of those at my primary school ended up.  It never occurred to me to wonder whether I too would go there.  Not that I assumed I would automatically go to a grammar school, because I would not have recognised the concept; it was more that I spent my childhood in a strange kind of volitional and experiential haze.

'Yes, Glyn?'  But I did know what the date was, what was special about it, and when it would happen again.  The answer seemed obvious, and that I should know it, natural.  Like my desk, like the sunshine that poured in through the high windows, like the steady progress through the junior school towards the 11+ exam and beyond, everything in my world seemed perfectly ordered and perfectly right.  My schooldays were hardly the happiest of my life, but they were totally stress-free, insouciant, and frictionless.  I scarcely felt them pass at all.  Time flew by in standing still.

Thus it is that I have few memories from that time, just the odd, flickering image from each year.  But the question that opened that June morning has remained with me ever since.  Eleven years, one month and one day after hearing it, I wrote on my 1977 desktop diary for 7 July: '(remember 6.6.66?)'.  And I did.

And I do today.  The anniversaries are moments of punctuation which come round with a quirky regularity, as if governed by sunspot activity.  Like strange, temporal vortices, they exert a complex force.  All my life, I know, they will give me pause for thought: thought for what was on these dates in the past; and thought for what might be in the future.

(1988)

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The finite brain

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We do not like to think about our brains.  When we look at the world we conveniently gloss over the sensation that the living person who sees seems to be located behind our eyes, in that cranial bowl of inert, grey paste.  Our niceness in this respect even shows itself in our eating.  The idea of eating brains is repulsive to most, which is strange given the other glands and organs we dine off - what are kidneys used for?  But eating it would confront us with the fact that the brain really is an organ, and physical.  From the inside it feels neither of these things.

Unfortunately the advent of computers has given us some troublesome metaphors and analogies.  In earlier days of pre-lapsarian computer innocence, we might accept the brain's workings as mysteries too deep to fathom, or even comprehend.  Now, though, we are almost forced to articulate concerns which were perhaps better left unspoken.

For example, all computer users know that you can never have enough memory.  When you run out - as always happens - you either upgrade your capacity, or you throw away old files to make room for new data.  The brain too stores data, though how is not clear in detail.  An obvious question poses itself: does the brain ever run out of memory?  Or, equivalently: just how finite is the brain?

As we blithely go through life, experiencing, learning, remembering, we assume that this state of affairs will continue until we die.  The idea that the brain might at some point become full, become incapable of learning or remembering any more, is terrifying.  But not ridiculous: the brain evolved in hominids whose life expectancy was around 35 years, not 70, and who moreover led a relatively simple and uneventful life.  Today, people probably experience more new sensations and ideas in a month than their distant forebears did in their entire lives.  Has the brain enough spare capacity to cope with this excess?  

If it hasn't, what will happen - given that there are, as yet, no upgrades for the brain?  The best we can hope for is that the brain will dump old memories and knowledge just as we delete old files.  We might lose treasured moments and hard-won skills from the past, but at least we would have room for the future.  This does, in any case, clearly happen: nobody remembers all their childhood, and the older you get, the less you recall from long ago.

Worse would be the situation where we simply forget everything we see or do or learn beyond a certain time.  If this were proved to happen, our whole attitude to life would alter.  No longer would we thoughtlessly be hungry for new knowledge and experiences; we would need to ration them, to apportion them year by year.  We would become parsimonious with our brain, costive with its valuable capacity.  Of course just as some poor fools now smoke and drug themselves heedless of the eventual damage, so we would have info addicts who gorged themselves on facts today, reckless of tomorrow.  For the rest of us there would be anti-education programmes, even government mental health warnings on books, art, music, on everything offering a new idea or experience.  It makes you think, doesn't it?

(1989)

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The check-out

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It is a sketch from countless comedy shows.  A man goes into a supermarket.  He lingers oddly over the carrots, he inspects carefully the boxes of soap.  His whole body speaks unease; he is shifty and continually looking over his shoulder.  Finally, he judges the moment to be right: he boldly seizes his prey and half runs up to the check-out till.  Just as he lays the article on the counter, from nowhere a woman appears and queues behind him.  The cashier decides to savour to the full the process of ringing up the price and finding a suitable bag.  All this while, the man's small package lies there accusingly, naked to the world; it seems to glow with obviousness.  Even in the age of AIDS, buying condoms is still not easy.

Our delicacy in purchasing intimate items such as these is purely vestigial.  For the most part, individuated goods have been reduced to abstract commodities: when you load up a trolley in a supermarket, it is almost as if you are buying generalised objects, things shucked of any purpose except to be bought, a fact underlined by the meaningless brand names and bland packaging which de-emphasise the good's real function.

So it is that we happily buy personal goods like expectorants and toilet paper without making the embarrassing connection with their final use - as we do with condoms.  Standing in the queue with these goods for all the world to see, we can pretend to disown them and their revelations, if only because everyone else tacitly agrees to do the same.

And yet that basket and each of its goods says something completely specific about you, your habits and your tastes.  If sociologists were to watch you at the check-outs, they could re-construct your daily life as an archaeologist reconstructs the past from its rubble.  Each item represents a line in the multi-dimensional space of consumerism; where all those lines intersect, is you.

This is not as abstract as it sounds.  Sociologists may not be hiding behind the sliced bread to carry out their research, but the statisticians are there.  One of the main reasons for the introduction of bar-coding in supermarket chains is to define who you, the public, are in precisely this way.  It is certainly not to speed up the process of checking out: the bottleneck is merely displaced from the pricing to the packing.  Instead it gives the stores employing barcodes in-depth and instant knowledge about purchasing patterns.

Hitherto, data on sales has been obtained by stocktaking - a slow and inefficient process.  Now, stores can see a snapshot of what is being sold at any instant by downloading the information from the automated tills and combining the data.  Moreover, if you pay by some form of identifying credit or debit card, an alternative picture could be built up, of your purchases over time.  From that it would be possible to make good guesses at your income, your family size, your tastes - even your sexual habits.  Imagine now a cashless society, and one where all such sales data were linked together: total information on every individual.  Governments are doubtless checking it out at this very moment.

(1989)

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Scarlatti's cat

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When we speak of a sixth sense, we speak vaguely or mystically.  It is hard to extrapolate from the five senses we know, which each seems to be unique and incomparable.  In fact, they form part of a series, with a clear underlying logic.  The sixth sense exists and extends that series.

The first sense was touch.  When life began, its primary means of detecting the outside world was the press of molecule on molecule.  Touch grew into smell and taste: the ability to determine properties of distant objects through the odours and flavours they unleash into the wind and the water.  Hearing too perceives other entities by their effects on the environment.  It continues the progression of the senses by widening the cognitive reach of the organism from the adjacent to several hundred metres away.  But that world is still crudely described: it took the development of sight to add an epistemological richness of detail.

Sight allows us to perceive our universe to the depths of infinity.  But it is not the last word in controlling that universe.  The first five senses are passive: they arose to give the organism progressively better chances in the Darwinian contest through superior information.  The sixth is more active, and evolved with mankind's ability to use tools.

The sixth sense can best be described as an innate bodily awareness: put simply, we know where our body is without the need to look.  An easy test is to close the eyes and then to touch your nose with your finger: the movements are possible because in the absence of any other input you are aware of the relative disposition of limbs.  This sense comes into its own with tools: through it we can with practice manipulate objects without the need to watch every movement we make with them.  An example is driving a car: you soon learn to press the pedals, change gears and switch on lights and wipers with your eyes fixed on the road: you just know - through your body - where everything is.

Perhaps the most impressive manifestation of this skill is in music.  Many instruments - the voice, strings, keyboards - require the player to know without looking where notes are: for violinists or singers, there are no markers for each pitch which must be learnt as a bodily position.  Similarly the pianist is often called upon to make quickly large and accurate leaps with the hands.

This technique became a commonplace in the Romantic period, when it was used to impress; a more interesting case is that of the Italian Baroque composer Domenico Scarlatti, who wrote over 500 sonatas for harpsichord.  Many of his pieces include the most extraordinary jumps for both hands.  One of his early works is a powerful fugue.  Although the sonata is without rapid leaps, its opening subject moves up the keyboard in a very unusual pattern.  Its oddness has led to the work being dubbed 'The cat's fugue' with the suggestion that the theme was produced by Scarlatti's cat walking across the keys.  The real reason is probably simpler: Scarlatti's delight in the physical sensation of keyboard playing meant that notes and themes placed awkwardly for the hands had for him a delicious extra dimension.  To some degree, we all have our own Scarlatti's cat.

(1990)

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Glanglish

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English has never existed as a unitary language.  For the Angles and the Saxons it was a family of siblings; today it is a vast clan in diaspora.    At the head of that clan is the grand old matriarch, British English.  Rather quaint now, like all aristocrats left behind by a confusing modern world, she nonetheless has many points of historical interest.  Indeed, thousands come to Britain to admire her venerable and famous monuments, preserved in the verbal museums of language schools.  Unlike other parts of our national heritage, British English is a treasure we may sell again and again; already the invisible earnings from this industry are substantial, and they are likely to grow as more and more foreigners wish at least to brush their lips across the Grande Dame's ring.

One group unlikely to do so are the natural speakers of the tongue from other continents.   Led by the Americans, and followed by the Australians, the New Zealanders and the rest, these republicans are quite content to speak English - provided it is their English.  In fact it is likely to be the American's English, since this particular branch of the family tree is proving to be the most feisty in its extension and transformation of the language.  Even British English is falling in behind - belatedly, and with a rueful air; but compared to its own slim list of neologisms - mostly upper-class twittish words like 'yomping' - Americanese has proved so fecund in devising new concepts, that its sway over English-thinking minds is assured.

An interesting sub-species of non-English English is provided by one of the dialects of modern India.  Indian English is not a truly native tongue, if only for historical reasons; and yet it is no makeshift second language.  Reading the 'Hindu Times', it is hard to pin down the provenance of the style: with its orotundities and its 'chaps' it is part London 'Times' circa 1930; with its 'lakhs' it is part pure India.

Whatever it is, it is not to be compared with the halting attempts at English made by millions - perhaps billions soon - whose main interest is communication.  Although a disheartening experience to hear for the true-blue Britisher, this mangled, garbled and bungled English is perhaps the most exciting.  For from its bleeding hunks and quivering gobbets will be constructed the first and probably last world language.  Chinese may have more natural speakers, and Spanish may be gaining both stature and influence, but neither will supersede this mighty mongrel in the making.  

English is so universally used as the medium of international linguistic exchange, so embedded in supranational activities like travel - all pilots use English - and, even more crucially, so integral to the world of business, science and technology - money may talk, but it does so in English, and all computer programs are written in that language - that no amount of political or economic change or pressure will prise it loose.  Perhaps not even nuclear Armageddon: Latin survived the barbarians.  So important is this latest scion of the English stock, that it deserves its own name; and if the bastard brew of Anglicised French is Franglais, what better word to celebrate the marriage of all humanity and English to produce tomorrow's global language than the rich mouthful of 'Glanglish'?

(1989)

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