Thoughts for your pennies

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First, the doll-like farthing went.  Then the twelve-sided brass threepenny bit, the halfpenny, and finally, in an orgy of numismatic vandalism, the shilling, the florin and the half-crown.  At a stroke, two thousand years of monetary history were swept away, a victim of ephemeral economics and a fetish for decimals.  The penny coin alone lives on, its nominal value increased, though otherwise pitiably reduced.

Holding an old penny today is a curious experience.  It feels so large and so heavy compared to the footling tiddlywink counter we so aptly call a 'p'.  It is a marvel of classic design, with its proud image of Britannia, and its stylised, cryptic inscription - itself almost a summary of English history over the last five hundred years - garlanding the monarch's head.  Moreover, it is not an isolated example like our current coin, which feels like a litter's runt: the same majestic form can be found in a great series which tracks centuries of Royalty in England.

Nor was this a theoretical assemblage.  Until decimalisation - that long, mincing weasel word for British money's equivalent to the destruction of the Library of Alexandria - nearly two hundred years of the past was to be found in your pocket, every day.  Searching through each handful of change made even the most mundane of financial transactions an adventure, a chance to stumble across a treasure subtly hidden by being everywhere.

Coins of Elizabeth II and George VI predominated; but those of George V and Edward VII were common too.  The former looked like the last Russian tsar, or perhaps Tchaikovsky, while the latter had the bald head of an all-in wrestler and the facial hair of an Airedale.  With characteristic formality each succeeding king or queen faced in alternating directions, partners in a regal pavan, making some look back to their predecessor, and others gaze ahead, as if trying to descry the future and the features that would one day in turn look back at them.  

But more exciting than any of these were the coins of Victoria.  In her sixty-five years as queen, billions of pennies were issued.  Though most were recalled to the Mint, surprising numbers survived down to our own day, and were to be found occasionally amongst the coinage of her descendants like an immortal old dowager turning up unexpectedly at a family gathering.  The length of her reign meant that her portrait changed several times, from the delicate young girl at the start - looking like something out of a Jane Austen novel - to the stout and dour old woman at the end, when the empress of a third of the world lived out her long widowhood in sadness and comparative solitude.

Finding any of her incarnations always sent a thrill through me.  This coin, I thought, has seen a hundred years of the world, been handled by half the nation, bought a million objects; what a story it could tell.  And I remembered one of those immortal school essay topics - 'The life of a penny' - which seemed so pointless then, but which now acquired a deeper wisdom.  A wisdom cut off now, just as that great metal river of coins pouring down through history has been cut off, dammed, diverted, and turned into the feeble trickle we know today.

(1989)

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The Turing point

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Most days of our lives we are required to prove who we are.  But communicating our identity to someone else - without recourse to intrusive techniques like genetic fingerprinting - is a tricky philosophical problem: in what true and dependable outward manifestations does the inner self lie?  Clearly, in nothing so mutable as appearance.  Instead, what is needed is some external correlate of the singularity that resides within.  Almost always the sign that is chosen is our signature.

On cheques, documents, instructions, receipts, orders and acknowledgements, our characteristic doodle is deemed to be a true and sufficient token of our participation and implication.  For most legal, economic and historical purposes, we are nothing but our signatures.  Yet how primitive it is: it harks back to an age when the ability to sign was so rare as to be almost magical.  The signature was like a secret rune, an imprint of the soul.  In practical terms, forgery was well-nigh impossible, since so few could write their own name, never mind anyone else's.  Today, the usefulness of signatures is founded on the assumption that, although ubiquitous now, each one remains inviolably unique.

This is about to change.  Technology is reaching the stage where machines will be able to produce perfect copies of any signature, correct down to the details of pen velocity, pressure and inclination to the paper.  At a stroke - or several - the trustworthiness of the signature will disappear.  With it will go our primary means of identifying people.

To combat this, other attributes will be investigated.  Voice recognition systems are already in use; their proponents claim that they can distinguish infallibly between a human voice and an impersonation.  This may be so, but related developments are subverting their usefulness.  Cognate devices can emulate an input voice by reversing the procedures of recognition, synthesising sound from the resultant data.  According to the original discrimination scheme, the output is necessarily identical.

A similar approach can be applied to any other human attribute.  For every verification test is made up of two processes: analysis and comparison.  The analysed input can therefore be used to reproduce all its salient characteristics - salient according to the test, that is - thus ensuring that the artificially constituted feature passes the test.  Anything that can be measured can be mimicked; and anything that mimics as well as the test can judge is indistinguishable by that test from the original.

So it will be that for any check proposed as a way of establishing personal identity, a machine will be able to mimic the specific feature under scrutiny.  Imagine, then, a machine that can simulate to the point of interchangeability every testable characteristic of a given person.  The aping machine, in all such respects, is that person.  Nor is this limited to the obvious tests of individuality: the same applies to intelligence, emotions and the rest of life's baggage.  This is the Turing point, when the distinction between machine and human vanishes.  And it will come.  Enjoy the uniqueness of your signature - and your humanity - while you can.

(1988)

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The crown in the jewel

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'The Lay of Havelok the Dane' is a thirteenth century Middle English poem written in the transitional language between the inflected Germanic of Anglo-Saxon and Chaucer's more modern tongue.  It is an engaging if unremarkable tale of a young Danish prince who discovers his royal origins and claims his stolen birthright - a kind of fairy-tale Hamlet - written in the period's characteristically fast-paced short rhyming couplets of four stresses.  For the antiquarian the main point of interest is that the step-father of the eponymous hero is called Grimsby, and the Lay purports to explain how he came to found the town of the same name.

More intriguing for the general reader is the plot device used to reveal Havelok's princely birth.  As he lies sleeping, a blinding ray of light issues from his mouth.  This unprepared irruption of the fantastic into an otherwise naturalistic tale may be surprising but it is by no means unique: a more famous and rather better poem in Middle English, 'Sir Gawain and the Green Knight', has a knight who is not only literally green, but who calmly submits to a beheading, then picks up his head and walks off with it.  The link with folklore's figure of the Green Man who dies and rises again - itself based on myths surrounding the cycle of planting and reaping crops - seems patent, as is the thoroughgoing permeation of the Arthurian cycle concerning the Quest for the Holy Grail with references to other pre-Christian vegetation rites.

Havelok's royal light is proof that he, like all kings and queens, is an extraordinary being, endowed with an angelic radiance.  It is an idea that has been part of the iconography of royalty since the very first representations, albeit in a sublimated form: the crown.  Those blinding rays may come from the head not the mouth, but in essence they are the same.  The gleaming crown is a physical embodiment of the halo of semi-divinity which has always clung to kinghood.

To reinforce this idea, the gold and silver of crowns have habitually been embellished with jewels.  Though the initial impulse may have been vanity and a love of manifest pomp, this development was no simple mindless display of the monarch's wealth.  These otherwise useless lumps of mineral were held precious when cut because they radiated another royal light, one that amplified the luminescence of the crown they adorned.

The imagery of gems is so faded, and our perception of them so dulled, that we forget too easily the tremendous presence of a fine jewel.  And if we can lose touch with the simple primitive awe owed to a single stone, how much greater is our need to be reminded of the humbling presence of a magnificent crown?  A useful corrective is a visit to the Jewel House at the Tower of London.  To see close up the Imperial State Crown with its thousands of brilliants, rubies and sapphires, or the noble and ancient St Edward's Crown, to witness the glinting prismatic rays of the Koh-i-noor diamond or of the Sceptre's huge Star of Africa is to experience afresh the raw power of the precious stone, to regain the sense of the mysterious and the transcendental in a true crown, and to reach back to the ancient knowledge that lay behind Havelok's strange but veridical proof of royalty.

(1990)

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Colonising names

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In all taxonomies there is a tension between brevity and limpidity.  At one end of the scale you could simply number every object in a class, a compact but unhelpful approach.  At the other end, you could attach a full, descriptive name, which aids understanding but negates classification's purpose, concision.

One problem common to all labelling systems is coping with the addition of new members.  As more and more are added, so the labelling must become more complex to encompass them.  A case in point is the allocation of telephone numbers.  Demand in London became so great that the capital was split into an inner and outer zone, with respective prefixes 071 and 081 replacing the old 01 code.  An alternative would have been to add an extra digit to every telephone number in the country, preserving London's single 01 prefix.  As usual, people have opted for the easier, though less logical, implementation.

The same growth in complexity has occurred with personal names.  Look at any long list of past incumbents in an ancient parish church, and it is striking how the names start off simply, perhaps just a Hugh or a Peter, and gradually blossom into John of Wykeham, before becoming full-blown first names and surnames.  Today we find that process taken even further, with middle names a crucial distinguishing factor in certain circumstances, especially bureaucratic ones.

Our hankering after older, simpler schemes manifests itself in social situations.  If we know someone well enough, we tend to think of them by their first name;  any confusion between similarly-named people is usually resolved by context.  This works well enough for business and casual acquaintances, but with names of our dearly beloved it is not so simple.

The closer we get to someone, the more we imbue their name with our feelings for them.  It is perhaps significant that we address our parents not by name, but call them instead by neutral descriptions - 'mother' and 'father'.  Given the strength of this emotional attachment we would probably find it impossible ever to apply their names to anyone else: in effect, that name would become our personal word for 'mother'.

But we have no such linguistic buffer with friends and lovers.  If we know John very well, or love Jane to madness, our reactions to those with the same name will never again be normal: the burden of the past, called up by that incantatory set of sounds, will obtrude between us and the person.  Similarly, once we have hated a Jim, we will find ourselves uncomfortably constrained in the presence of a new, quite blameless Jim.

It is as if each name can carry only one experience for us: once charged, it is used up, set, a mental landmark we must live with and move around.  The people we know and love circumscribe our future acts and relations: we may rebuff the perfect mate for her wrong name, or find ourselves unable to christen our child as we wish without making him a revenant.  In a world of colonised names, we wander poor and dispossessed.  Perhaps it would be easier if we were called by our telephone numbers.

(1989)

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Accidents and substance

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Some people seem to have aerodynamic souls.  They go through life causing barely an eddy in the great stream of the world.  After painless childhoods, they grow up, get a job, get married, get a family, get old and die - all as effortlessly as a fish moves through water.  Often, they are deeply content; but they never appear in history.  They are completely invisible, and live, if at all, only through their children who carry their name and perhaps a faint memory of endless summer holidays spent with a smiling, faceless couple.

Contrast them with those who travel through life with all the grace of a thrown brick.  Whatever smoothness existence requires at a particular moment for an easy passage, they proffer only corners and edges.  They have desperate, terrible childhoods which they carry around for the rest of their lives like criminal records.  Adolescence is a painful cosmic joke.  If they marry at all, it is always the wrong person; if they have children, they have too many or at the wrong time.  Their home is a disaster: constant repairs, burglaries, fires.  In old age they are plagued by illness, and are abandoned by their relatives.  Death, when it comes, comes too late, or at an embarrassing moment, or messily.  But these are people whose days are richly textured, and who wear life's scars like medals.  And you remember the look in their eyes for ever.

Most of us fall between the two, divided between a cowardly desire for an easy, painless path through this world, and a craving for incident.  As ever, we cheat and compromise: we seek comfort in reality and fulfilment in fantasy.  We may daydream about the ideal partner; imagine the success and riches of our own business; begin to think about planning that daring holiday; but we make do with a nice semi-detached, 2.4 kids and a dog.

To compensate, we turn to the great surrogates.  There is entertainment, whose constant, specious excitement fills temporarily the yawning gaps in your soul, without real engagement or risk; and there is art, whose basic premise is that its creators offer you their suffering and exaltation in return for honour, a little money, and absolution for their lives.

Absolution because the greatest artists have always failed, have always been social misfits, bad wives and husbands, spendthrifts, political dupes, cripples and emotional wrecks.  They were profound creators not just because they suffered, but because they were able to channel that anguish into art, to win from it self-knowledge, knowledge about life and death which we gratefully receive.  Genius is never enough; to create a masterpiece, a Mozartian facility must be married with a Mozartian misery.

When we envy unthinkingly the great writers, painters, composers and the rest, we should remember the price they paid - usually unwillingly - for their glory.  And when we are in pain, or robbed or beaten, when we are tricked by shysters, when we are burnt by deep and hopeless love, lacerated by loss of family, or ravaged by disease, we should remember that like those artists we too have the possibility of seizing from vicissitudes something other than raw despair, of gaining through these accidents of life a real and lasting inner substance.

(1989)

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Meta-physicality

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The social dimension of health clubs is well recognised.  Nobody pretends they join one just to become fit: for that, street-running and working out at home easily suffice.  Instead, they function as our time's equivalent of the nineteenth-century gentlemen's clubs, primary sites for meeting like-minded people.  But now the differentiating specialisations of the Garrick, the Athenaeum or the Reform have been replaced in the health industry by a commonality of preoccupations which together might stand as our era's epitaph: the post-modern trinity of youth, beauty and money.

The basic premise of health clubs - energetic physical exercise by the nearly-naked - determines the first two.  It is something of an irony that such clubs are attended only by those whose bodies are reasonably fit and good-looking to start with: the constant appraisal by hypercritical peers - encouraged by the unforgiving mirrors placed everywhere - is enough to enforce this aesthetic with all but the most self-confident or oblivious of bodily offenders.

The third element of the health club's defining triad arises from unsubtly elitist pricing.  In a rebuff to naive economic theories of demand, upmarket health clubs prosper and gain more members as their annual fee rises: in doing so, an implicitly better - that is, richer - class of person is selected, and the perceived quality and attractiveness of the membership increases.  It is the mitigated, incremental version of not wanting to join any club that would have you as a member.

But health clubs are not all crass superficiality and snobbish materialism; there is a strong moral dimension too.  It stems from the very nature of the physical work-out.  Because there is no alternative to enduring the full grind and hell of exercise to achieve its end-results, you cannot cheat.  Working out offers the all-too literal embodiment of getting only what you pay for, with the added twist that money alone cannot buy you fitness - even in a health club: you have to earn it through your personal, sweaty endeavours.  Most extremely, the gym's apothegm is 'no pain, no gain': not only must you work for your achievements, you must pay with suffering.  The reward of the resultant sense of smug self-satisfaction is almost greater than that of fitness.

One consequence of meting out this punishment is that you become intensely alive to the fact and technology of your body.  As you push harder against the flesh and its limits, your attention focuses on the battle between body and mind.  In this apparent dualism, the extraordinary nature of will manifests itself: you are forcing yourself to do something you both want and do not want to do.  But once the exercise has finished, and you begin in the tranquillity of your endorphins to reap its benefits, it is the negation of that dualism you are most aware of.  Just as those who are grossly fat seem to move their bodies as if they were huge imposed barrels of being that must be rolled awkwardly along, so those who are trim and fit have paradoxically no sense of the physicality of their bodies at all.  Instead, they become pure mind, their erstwhile limbs weightless and perfect mediators of the will.  Ultimately the health club's work-out proves to be not so much physical as metaphysical.

(1990)

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The plane truth

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Air travel has become a symbol of late twentieth century life, of the triumph of technology, and of the latter's democratisation.  We therefore have a vested interest in acquiescing in its romantic mythologies.  We affect to believe that in entering this smooth and gleaming skybound vessel we somehow partake of the pioneering spirit of the Wright brothers, Spitfire pilots and astronauts.  Unfortunately, the airlines know better.

They know that they are dealing with a ridiculous situation: hundreds of people trapped in a flimsy metal hull, surrounded by thousands of gallons of explosive air fuel.  They know that, like overcrowded rats, passengers would probably go mad and run amok if they were fully cognisant of their condition and of its unnaturalness.  They know that their main business is to take our minds off imminent destruction by unremitting distraction.

To do this, airlines employ as their model the principal paradigm of control and deceit: childhood.  Adults habitually adopt artful ploys to keep children quiet, to keep them obedient, to keep them happy.  To make mass air travel possible, the operating companies have engaged in a thoroughgoing campaign of passenger infantilisation, reducing all the jetsetting executives and package tour holidaymakers to a group of boys and girls out on an educational day-trip's jaunt.

The process begins with boarding.  You are trooped on to the aircraft by class and number like a bunch of unruly schoolkids, shepherded by men and women dressed in uniforms and acting the bossy monitor; you are told to sit down in neatly-ordered rows - all of which face the front - and are then strapped into your chair to stop you fidgeting.  Before the plane can leave, you must pay attention to the day's lesson: the voice of the unseen teacher on the intercom explains the usual incomprehensible things about lifejackets and oxygen masks - serious, adult matters that seem boring and irrelevant like so much education; meanwhile, snooty prefects mime woodenly by rote.  Just as at school, nobody really listens.

Shortly after take-off, you are brought a drink - drugged, usually, to make you complaisant - and then, a meal.  It appears instantaneously, hot and from nowhere: it is a well-known fact that the food of childhood never needs preparation.  The packaging in particular seems calculated to appeal to young minds: lots of fascinating wrappings to remove, your own personal cutlery, condiments, bread and butter - and, of course, an individual towelette to wipe your fingers and face with afterwards.  At least the stewardess does not try to do this for you, as your mother often did.

Thus all of your time on the plane is spent like a baby: in eating, sleeping, or being amused - or in going to the toilet.  One of the mysteries of air travel is how hundreds of passengers with little to look at or think about manage to ignore what exactly is going on in those small square cubicles placed so centrally and visibly.  When people rush for the toilets as soon as a meal has ended, and those embarrassingly obvious queues start to snake down the aisles, everyone acts as they would in the presence of a child on a potty, who becomes invisible.  The romance of air travel, indeed.

(1989)

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