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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Pravda

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During the interval of Hare and Brenton's 'Pravda' we went out onto the terrace of the National Theatre.  As we drank, we noticed a shimmering in the sky above the Thames directly in front of the building.  "Probably a UFO" we said jokingly, passing back inside to the comforting lights.

When we came out at the end, and walked to the car parked on Waterloo Bridge, we saw not one but two illuminated shapes, both hovering over Somerset House, but at different heights.  Along the bridge, clumps of people were gathered, staring up at the sky.  Passing cars would occasionally slow, winding down their windows to get a better view.  There could be no doubt about the phenomenon's reality.

It was a perfectly clear night: the stars were everywhere visible.  There was no sound on the breeze, so helicopters were ruled out.  Airships had been a common sight that year, but this vague, watery light looked nothing like that.  They were too high for flags or other objects tethered by a rope - and one had just moved even higher.

On closer examination they had the appearance of slowly pulsating or rotating objects.  Sometimes patterns like figures of eight would appear.  Mostly, though, the effect was constantly changing and indescribable.  After a while, we went home, but soon returned, drawn back despite ourselves.  Now there was only one light, much higher.  Shortly afterwards it moved south across the sky.  It seemed very slow; and yet in a few seconds it had disappeared over the horizon.  It was a warm autumn evening but gradually a chill spread down our spines.

Ten thousand years of civilisation and rather fewer of rationalism told us that there had to be a sensible explanation.  Most of the bystanders seemed able to accommodate the sight in their mental universe without difficulty.  Try as I might, I could not share their equanimity.

Yet the alternative to glib acceptance was almost too terrible to name.  UFOs lie so far outside the range of normal experience that they have been banished from serious discourse.  People have been marginalised and branded mad just for countenancing the idea.  Perhaps this is only natural: the implications of visitors from another planetary system would be such as to undercut every treasured assumption of ordinary life.

For example: if they had succeeded in making such a journey, their technology would be unimaginably more advanced than ours.  Demonstrably losing our place as the acme of the universe would be a blow to our sense of self unmatched since Kepler, or Darwin.  Moreover, galactic serfdom - in much the same way as the West has visited and vanquished the Third World - would have to be a strong possibility.

Standing on the bridge was like teetering on the brink of an absurd yet terrifying sci-fi film.  But nothing happened, neither that night or the next day.  There were no announcements, no news.  Everybody went on as normal.  And yet for me those events remained as true as they were inexplicable.

(1986)

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Forever Eden

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"On Sunday 7th August your teddy can have a go at parachuting on Rusper School field...The guided walk will be 4-5 miles, starting from the Village Hall at 3 p.m., and returning for tea at approximately 5.30 p.m...There will be a coffee morning at Orltons, Rusper, on 11th July, from 10 a.m. till 12 noon.  Proceeds - 75% to St Catherine's Hospice, 25% to Rusper Conservative Association...Wanted urgently! Wool - odd balls or skeins - even old knitted items which can be unpicked - to keep the needles clicking on babies' vests and 6" squares...At the time of writing these notes, we are having quite a dry spell, and if this continues, it is a good time to hoe very diligently..."

Extracts from the July 1988 Parish News of St Mary Magdalene, Rusper.  A characteristic mix of endless tombola, religious propaganda, local politics, gardening, prayer, advertising and homely saws - 'a smile will always increase your face value.'  As English as the village of Rusper itself, with its main road, quiet and winding, and a side street dominated by the Victorian schoolhouse; a couple of ancient pubs, a general store with empty sherry bottles in its bare and dusty window, and venerable houses leaning on each other like old age pensioners; a noticeboard with the times of the daily bus to Horsham, and details of the next meeting of the parish council; an Elizabethan coaching inn - and, of course, the parish church.

Resplendent amidst the bright green grass and lichened graves, the warm stone of the neat and compact building has been meticulously restored, and looks as if it has been dressed and placed only yesterday.  Which it has, except that yesterday here is 700 years ago.  The simple and dignified nave ends in the thickset tower whose earliest arches are narrow and show only the slightest of points.  On the east face there is a clock; on the cover of the Parish News the hands stand at an eternal ten to three.  Inside, faded plaques record the three hours and three minutes taken to ring all the changes on the eight bells in 1903, together with a list of names.  Names of the bellringers, names that somehow always reappear on memorials to those fallen in that Great and most terrible war which shattered the old world of villages like Rusper forever.

Now it is the continual shrieking of the straining jets as they lift off from nearby Gatwick which rends the peace of this idyll.  But Rusper endures, just as the families who lost their sons and husbands and fathers endured.  Rusper and its ilk lie at the quiet and indestructible heart of England.  They populate a land which still has flower shows where the double crust apple pie is "to be displayed on a plate or board and not in a tin or container" if it is to be eligible for the 40p first prize or 20p second prize. A land which is easy to mock for its unfashionable beliefs: "Lady Cox asked for the prayers and support of fellow Christians in her endeavour to enshrine Christian worship and R.E. in our schools."  But it is also a land of fundamentally decent and caring folk - "my sincere and grateful thanks to the many people who wrote to me while I was in hospital.  The friendliness of Rusper people is indeed wonderful."  Wonderful indeed.  As the Reverend Eric Passingham says in his Letter from the Rectory: "The curtains pulled back revealed a touch of Eden."

(1988)

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Digital reality

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A few hundred years from now the world currency will be the Tera. Short for Terabyte, it represents a million million bytes of digital information. Roughly speaking this corresponds to half a million printed books. The data contained in a Tera will be arbitrary but meaningful: it will be the equivalent of a random selection of a twentieth of the British Library's present holdings. Within such a deluge there will be countless useful facts as well as countless useless ones. The sheer volume will ensure that there are enough of the former in every Tera to provide near parity in value with all other Teras of random structured information.

Surprisingly, a Tera is a small unit. A human being processes about two Teras every hour; multiply that by a world population of tens or hundreds of billions and you have millions of billions of new Teras every year. Add in the billions of computers and their information, as well as the countless billions of Teras from the past, and the quantity becomes unimaginable.

Billions of computers because by this time they will be ubiquitous. The basic models will be as small, cheap, and easy to use as a pen or pencil. Like pencils, they will be thrown away after a couple of uses. But where writing implements can be said only in a metaphorical sense to offer half a million English words or the ability to perform operations in calculus, the pen-sized computers will possess these skills literally, as well as providing myriad other functions.

But nobody will bother using them, any more than people use slide rules or log tables today. The real, state-of-the-art computers will be invisible. They will be the chair you sit in, the wall you lean against, the ground you walk on. The chair will not have a computer as such: it will be one. Or rather, every aspect of it - its shape, its colour, its position - will be the output from one.

Such environmental computers will no longer model reality through simulations: instead, they will offer an infinitely detailed alternative version that merges seamlessly into the old, physical variety. Potentially, every aspect of our world will be formed by computers capable of creating every experience.

Most people will be hooked on this drug of artificial, digital reality. Unlike the already addictive arcade games and television serials of today - which are flint tools in comparison to this future technology - digital reality will not just be a temporary substitute for real life, it will replace it totally, until the latter has no independent meaning. Like all junkies, digital addicts will habituate and constantly demand fresh stimulation in the form of new, manufactured experiences. To provide them, the billions of environmental computers must feed ravenously and unceasingly off the only source of experience's raw material, the Teras of structured data held around the planet. Their competing demands for a limited resource will valorise it; information will become society's most sought-after commodity, its invisible gold, its weightless coinage. Those that control that information, the data lords, will rule the world.

(1989)

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The oscillating universe

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When we are born, we are co-extensive with the universe.  The light, the food, the warmth, everything that happens is part of us, a manifestation of our being.  Although we cannot formulate what it is, we know without self-consciousness or mediation, that the sun is at one with us, and that its rising is as much our natural and unwilled movement as our breathing or the beating of our heart.

Gradually, though, through small and larger pains, through encountering strange obstacles which do not bend to our will, we learn that there is an Other out there, a Not-us.  With time and a honing of the treacherous senses, that Otherness grows like a black balloon, filling all the space around us, until the darkness seems infinite, and we, small and frightened children now, an insignificant speck within it.

As during childhood our mind begins to understand this vastness, to order it through intelligence, we start to re-claim our lost natal heritage.  First our immediate surroundings are rendered safe, moulded into an integral part of our world, a daily given; then more and more is added until as an adolescent we feel that the universe may still be vast, a worrying and threatening place, but that our powers too are vast.

This is the glorious overconfidence of youth.  Just as those who have never fallen deeply ill, crashed a car or been robbed secretly feel that they really are immune to troubles, so at this age we employ a false induction: since we have never failed, we can do anything.  This is the time of magnificent idealism, when we feel that we have a responsibility for the world, that we can - indeed must - change it for the better.  We embrace mankind and the globe like a benevolent giant.

We forget how infancy taught us the world wanted none of our hugs and kisses.  Slowly and with hurt, we re-learn this lesson.  Checked now physically, now mentally, now in work, now in love, we realise that we cannot storm the citadels of heaven; that we are mortal, that we will die, and probably without achievements.  So we begin to turn our glance away from the wider horizons; we turn inward to marriage, to a family.

In mature adulthood, our domain has shrunk to the confines of the home.  We have responsibilities enough without taking on the troubles of the world.  Perhaps we ought to care passionately about starving millions; but what with yet another pair of new shoes for little Joey, and the house needing a fresh coat of paint, it all seems so far away.  The older we get, the tireder we get, the more vulnerable we feel to the random and pointless ravages of fate.  We do not want to fight; we want a quiet life.

Finally, as old age asserts its dominion, we want even less.  All desires are past, incomprehensible memories.  Friends and family are dead or distant; nobody claims us out there.  Now, we are the world: our bodies become our pre-occupation - that ache, that stiffness, that weakness.  Our days become the measured and self-observed inhalation and exhalation of breath.  As our heartbeats slow, and the oblivion of sleep flees us, we become a silent watcher of our own being; nothing else exists.

(1989)

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