Stay in your lane!

 

 

 

Last night was not a good one.

     Incipient back ache developed during the night into one of those pains that while it wasn’t truly bad, it was bad enough to preclude the possibility of sleep.  And whatever position you choose, it is never the right one for any length of time.

     It reminded me of the horror (there really is no other word that captures it) that comes with trying to sleep in a horizontal position after having a complete knee replacement.  At its worst, my ‘sleep’ was limited to ten minutes from the time of hitting the mattress – not that’s not the right word, getting onto the bed was a tortuously slow process, as was getting up again – and giving up.

     Salvation during that period came from the reclining chair in the living room.  Although the foot rest part of the reclining process was never long enough to accommodate my height, it did allow me to adopt a three-quarter’s prone position that allowed at least fitful sleep – the sort that only occurs through exhaustion.

     What worked once for knees was pressed (literally with the reclining switch) into service for the back.  And to be fair, it did, sort of work.  The pain was still there, but it was almost like a ‘noises off’ effect and it allowed something approaching unconsciousness – a state I would not equate with real sleep.

     Because I go for a swim every morning during the week at 6.30 am, I am programmed to wake early and, even though the pool does not open until 8.00 am on the weekends, my internal body alarm does not differentiate, and I wake up at 5.45 am.

     Which I did this morning, and that gave me one and a half hours to debate with myself whether or not it might be a good thing to go for a swim or simply to stay at home, as, after a few tentative stretches it demonstrated that the pain in my back was still there.

     Eventually, I decided to go, as I reasoned that the water is supportive and I could adapt, tailor and truncate my pool activity to fit my pain threshold.

     The reality when I got into the pool showed that my decision not to skip a session was correct.  Not one of the exercise or stokes was so painful that it could not be done, and so I ended up completing a fairly normal session, with one or two of my exercises extended as I felt that the stretching might be beneficial.

     I cannot say that my swim has helped lessen the pain, which vividly reminds me of its presence when I move in certain ways, but I tell myself that I have exercised, and I have done my stretches, and so, even if I cannot feel the benefits immediately, it will help in the long run.  And in the short run there is the ever-present help of Paracetamol and pungent smelling unguent.  And looking at those two words ‘pungent’ and ‘unguent’ there must be some sort of linguistic link, that I am far too lazy to look up.

     Anyway, none of the above is the point that I set out to write about.  If you are in pain and the drugs and creams have had little effect, then you search for other ways to lessen the affliction.  And the swimming pool offers many.

     Ever since Covid our 25m swimming pool has been roped off into five lanes, and there is a booking system so that the lanes do not get overfull.  In theory each lane can take three swimmers as long as they swim in circles, or rather squashed ellipses.  This system depends on the three swimmers understanding the speed of the people sharing the lane and make due allowances, for example, allowing a stronger swimmer to overtake from time to time.  In theory this system works well.  In theory.

     In practice lanes are jealously guarded and any perfectly reasonable sharing is regarded more as an invasion.

     For example, I swim in lane 1, or lane 5, depending on how you look at it.  I have chosen (!) this lane because there is a hydraulic chair which lowers me into the water and the ladder that accompanies the equipment is particularly difficult to use.  With my two wonky knees I feel that I am more than entitled to use this ingress and egress, and I further feel that such a flamboyant entry surely entitles me to enjoy the lane in splendid isolation – and anyone sharing the lane will have to contend with the steps that jut out into the water and make a straight line difficult to keep.

     Although the basic stokes of swimming are well known, you only must compare two people swimming say crawl to see that their approach to the stroke is different.  In some cases, it is difficult to say with any confidence what particular official version of the common crawl or breaststroke that they are using.  The position of the hands, the length of the stroke, the turn of the head, the time underwater, the breathing, and the use of the legs and feet make an individual’s technique just that, individual.

     And then there is the amount of space that a person takes up when executing their brand of stroke.  The lanes are delimited by floats, they are, by definition, floating.  There is no separation vertically from the floats to the floor of the pool, only observation and consideration keep flailing hands, arms and feet inside the imaginary boundaries of an individual’s lane.

     Crawl is usually (just about) contained within the body’s width – though I have seen some versions of crawl where it is impossible to tell the difference between that and energetic drowning.  Breaststroke goes well outside the body’s width and if you are swimming your squashed ellipse in a lane with three swimmers and are near the floats then your hands and feet are almost certainly going to make your swimming into a contact sport.

     And then there is butterfly.  The sine qua non of selfishness in communal swimming – apart from one extraordinary occurrence I witnessed of a person swimming a width of backstroke when everyone else was swimming lengths!

     So, to lessen the paint of my backache I observed the tensions, the threats and the resentments that are inevitable when people seek to join an already crowded pool.

     As I start and end my session with a series of exercises based on the instructions from the physio who saw me through the first awful weeks after my operation, I have the opportunity to watch various dramas unfold with the barely concealed distate of people who think they are being hard done by.

     And it works.  I was more concerned about the human drama swimming around me than the pain tickling my back!

 

Cutting the tape

    

 

 

Next month will see me going to Barcelona for an allegedly ‘free’ appointment that I had to pay 100€ to get, as all normal attempts to get one on line are next to impossible. 

     The appointment is to renew my NIA my Número de Identificación de Extranjero is a very important card with my unique identification number.  I show this card when I leave the country and, most importantly, when I return, as that means that my passport is not stamped, as I have a permanent right to reside in Spain.  The number, if not the actual physical card, is often asked for, for example when packages arrive.  And I haveofficaldome, padrón, tea,  used it so often in Spanish, that I consciously have to translate the numbers into English when I need to use them myself on forms.

     Spanish bureaucracy is notoriously photocopy-heavy: officials like you to have copies of everything and anything to give them, and they reciprocate by giving you a wodge of photocopies in return, usually on odd coloured recycled paper, which gives the impression that they are always thinking of the environment.  You never, of course, look at these photocopies ever again, and they have no function but to exist.

     So, as I was doing my morning write, after my well-deserved post-swim cup of tea, I mused to myself about what I should take to the appointment.  You are obviously told what to bring, documents like the old card and your passport, but they do not tell you that they might require lasting proof that they had seen them – you’ve guessed it, a photocopy of the documents.

     One time, with one official department I was dealing with, I was told that I needed to supply photocopies of the documents that I had bought, and I told them that I didn’t have photocopies, perhaps they could make them if they needed them.  “We are not a photocopy shop!”  I was told.  I had to leave the office and my appointment, for which I had queued for over half an hour.  Find a photocopy shop.  Get the photocopies done, return and queue again to continue the appointment.  The second wait was not as long as the first, but the seething rage that I barely controlled made it seem like an eternity.

     So, this time, you consider not only what they have asked for, but also what they might ask for.  There was a television sketch show here in Spain where one skit showed someone waiting in a queue to get some official business done:  He eventually reached the window and the official asked for identity card, passport, then asked for blood group, followed by favourite film – all of which needed documentation and, in the case of the film a VHS Cassette of it, and so it went one, with ever more bizarre demands, with the guy showing that he had anticipated all of these outré requests.  At the point where he appeared to have satisfied all demands, the official informed him that he was in the wrong queue and the window that he needed had closed.  I may have made up the ending to the skit, but the guy did not get what he wanted!

     To most Spaniards the skit is not comedy but documentary as everyone will have stories of bureaucracy gone mad – or normality as it is more generally known.

     I have decided to pay a visit to the local city hall and get an updated copy of my padrón, which is a certificate that shows my address is registered with the local authority.  It is not necessary, but it is official and officials like adding it to the bundle of papers that make their lives worth living.  And it costs nothing.

     The key concept is Be Prepared – or at least as prepared as you possibly can be.  And that two word phrase made me think of the organization with which is it most usually associated, The Scouts.

     I am a failed Scout.  I was a Wolf Cub and even carried the flag in our official processions through our local streets when we went to attend Church once a month, but in the move from Cathays to Rumney to a new area, I did not continue my participation in the Cubs, and therefore never became a Boy Scout.

     “Be prepared” was the motto of the scout organization, but we had an oath that we recited at the start of each of our meetings.  “I promise to do my best, to do my duty to God and the Queen, to keep the Law of the Wolf Cub Pack, and to do a good turn for somebody every day.”  My mind then wondered if that oath had changed over the years.  So, I looked it up.  The ‘Oath’ is now called ‘The Cub Promise’: “I promise that I will do my best, to do my duty to God and to The King, to help other people and to keep the Cub Scout Law.”  There are versions for Cubs who are Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Humanist, Jewish, Muslim, Sikh and for Atheist or of no faith background.

     Rather like the Anglican Creed, that I found myself not saying parts of as I grew older, feeling that the truth of what it contained needed to be rather more nuanced to accommodate my changing beliefs, so with the Oath or Promise. 

     When I was a Cub I was a Christian, so the ‘duty to God’ would not have been a problem, but as a life-long, and I mean for as long as I can remember, I have been a republican, so ‘my duty to the Queen’ would have been problematical even for the child that I was.  There again, both God and The Queen seemed to be somewhat above my paygrade, and as we had never been personally introduced, I knew about them only via intermediaries,  The immediacy was so slight that the actual ‘duty’ could be taken as read, if one kept to the rest of the oath.

     Then my drifting mind turned to the National Anthem.  Obviously, we in Wales have our own anthem, and we tend to regard God Save the King (how odd it feels to be typing that as someone who has grown up with the Queen as the central figure) as the English national anthem.  Just as the Union Flag has no part of it representing Wales, so we feel that God Save the King is, at best, ‘other’.

      And then I ran through the lyrics in my head.  You must understand that I never sing God Save the King.  Never.  And haven’t done for years.  I stand when the so-called National Anthem is played and I show respect, but frankly I feel none to the subject of the song.  But strangely, as I sang through the lyric in my head. I got stuck at line 4.  And the line would not come.  No matter how hard I tried. 

     I knew the words of the second verse (unlike so many members of that performative group of idiots in Reform) as a direct result of being in the Cubs, we had to learn the second verse as part of some badge or other.  But that line that I had heard, god knows how many times, remained hidden. 

     Although I am writing about it, and checking all the verses of the national anthem is but a click away, I prefer to remain in darkness.  After all, even if it does come back to me, I have zero intention of ever singing it!

     I thought that this piece of writing was going to be how different the Oath that I took and the Promise that modern Cubs take were.  But they are basically the same, and there is something rather splendid in the simple and direct injunction to “help other people”.

     Isn’t all human decency encapsulated in that phrase?

My Way the Only Way! Or Else!

 

 

 

 

“I’ll thcream and thcream ‘till I’m thick!”

     So threatened Violet Elizabeth Bott, the utterly spoiled rich kid of a nouveau riche millionaire in Richmal Crompton’s “Just William” books.  A phrase trotted out by her whenever she was not getting her way, and one used to threaten the lovable rogue William who was the unlikely scion of an impeccably middle-class family in a country village in southern England.   

     The eleven year old William (he does not age in, spite of the fact that the Just William series of books was published over a period of almost fifty years from 1922 to 1970) is a loveable rogue and leader of his gang of the Outlaws (with his mongrel dog, Jumble) who, while constantly trying to do what he sees as good, is just as constantly frustrated, or misunderstood.

     These characters came to mind when I was reading the news this morning and saw what the latest antics of the Lying Sex Pest involved.

     Whatever trouble William ended up in, he was never vicious in what he was about.  William and his Outlaws saw themselves as positively knightly, seeking to do good and right wrongs.  The fact that few others saw them in that light was the reason the stories were so enjoyable.  William was fundamentally decent, and not mean minded.

     Trump, however, is the antithesis of Just William, and the comparison in the stories is not the ‘heroic’ and the oh-so-misunderstood William, but the spoilt brat Violet Elizabeth Bott.

     Like her, Trump’s whole existence and development is based on the wealth of his father.  Apart from his wholesale corruption as President, his previous entrepreneurship was one series of disasters after another, with his failures being compensated for by his father’s cash.  Trump is the epitome of small-minded selfishness that characterises the whole breed of entitled nepo babies who actually believe that they got to their positions by merit alone!

     Trump, god help us, is the single most powerful person on earth, the President of the United States of America, but he behaves like the most insecure non-entity, needing constant reinforcement and being totally unable to take contradiction or denigration – though like all bullies, he is supremely at ease in dishing it out.

     He is no William, but he is a perfect Violet Elizabeth Bott, who will threaten tantrums unless she gets her way.

     I would say that the latest revealing incident of Trumps pettiness is the re-naming of Lake Ontario as Lake America.  But what is left to ‘reveal’ about this apology for a president that we haven’t seen so many times before.

     The charade of the re-naming ceremony was at a press conference in the Oval Office of the White House.  What was an elegant workplace is now so festooned with the gaudy gilt of gold, that it makes Trump look like some sort of bloated makeup-plastered caricature of a Madame of a sleezy brothel.  With a squeaky Sharpie, this grubby monstrosity, draws his oversized signature and displays it to his cult members for the customary adulation.

     The pettiness of his actions in a world of disasters (some of which are of his own making) that should be claiming his attention, is breathtaking – if we hadn’t seen so many instances of his unparalleled childishness and spite in the past.  We are getting numbed through repetition so that we merely shrug at his antics, rather condemn and urge those who could, to force his resignation.

     But those who could and should, don’t. 

     And so Violet Elizabeth Bott-Trump continues to bully and, of course, to get things wrong. 

     Did anyone tell the very stable genius Trump, as he crossed out Ontario and inserted America on one of the Great Lakes, that America is the name of a Continent and NOT a country.  The United States of America is part of America but is not America. 

     So, in his ignorant spitefulness, he has actually renamed a lake for the whole of a continent and not for a mere country – how woke is that!

 

 

 

 

 

Degrees of Separation

   

 

The film of the catastrophic flash flood in Nepal is horrific, and the likely casualty rate is likely to be high, so many people are still unaccounted for.  The immediacy of the films brings home the casual brutality of Nature, and the ease with which a whole way of life can be brushed aside in moments.  But this is a disaster in Nepal, a far distant country from my placid residence next to the Med in Castelldefels.

     That ‘distance’ was obliterated when I greeted a friend after completing my morning swim.  I asked after his ‘aches and pains’ as he has been having muscular trouble, but he rejected my questions and asked if I had seen the film of the flood.  I told him I had and he then told me that this was a place he knew.  He had worked there, he knew people who lived there, he had seen pictures of a building that had been his administrative centre being destroyed in images that he had been sent which had not been seen on TV.

     Suddenly, a distant disaster was humanized and localized, I was speaking to someone who had knowledge of and a stake in what had been lost.

     Life goes on.  He was, after all, preparing to have a swim, as he does most days, but his mind was not centred on getting a good lane in the pool to himself.  It was a long way away.

     This event has forced my mind back to something more local, the Valencia DANA (Depresión Aislada en Niveles Altos), an isolated high-impact depression, which is a meteorological phenomenon characterized by extreme weather events, particularly in regions like the Mediterranean Sea basin.

     An abstract from a report by members of the University of Valencia sums up the disaster:

 

The unprecedented DANA floods that struck Valencia, Spain on October 29, 2024, caused catastrophic human, economic, and ecological damages, resulting in 223 fatalities, the displacement of 15,000 residents, and long-term health and environmental consequences and incurred financial losses estimated over 50 billion euros. Vulnerabilities in urban planning, ambiguous command and control oversight, delayed warnings, and insufficient preparedness underscored systemic gaps in the flood preparedness and management.

 

     The key concepts are found in the last sentence, and the apportioning of blame is ongoing.  The President of Valencia, Carlos Mazón, was widely condemned for his lack of urgency in the early stages of the disaster, but he took over a year ignoring repeated calls for him to go, for him finally to resign.

     In the immediate aftermath of a disaster attention is rightly focussed on rescue and reconstruction.  But almost as important are the efforts made to understand exactly what occurred, and how the disaster was dealt with, in other words, looking for lessons to try and ensure that the disaster is not repeated.

     In the case of the DANA in Valencia, politics and self-interest have complicated the issues.  In extraordinary scenes on November 3^rd, a few days after the tragedy, the King and Queen of Spain, accompanied by high-ranking officials were pelted with mud and met with cries of “Murderers!” when they visited Paiporta, one of the municipalities worst affected by the floods.

     In May in 2025 a delegation of family member victims of the DANA went to the EU in Brussels to demand truth, justice and accountability as they felt that the response of the administration in Valencia and in Madrid had been wholly inadequate.  They stressed that they were there, “not for revenge, but for truth and justice.”  One of their leaders said, “We are not here out of pity.  We are here because we have the right to know why our children, parents, siblings died, and to know who had the duty to protect them and failed.”

     In the Grenfell tower disaster, I am reminded of Conservative peer, Lord Pickles, who, when he was Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, his department was directly responsible for housing policy, building regulation and fire safety guidance.  In Cameron’s government, Pickles enthusiastically championed a “one in, one out” (and later “one in, two out”) rule to slash building regulations and bureaucracy, thus compromising officials from tightening laws on combustible building materials.

     While he was being questioned, giving evidence in the Inquiry, he suggested that the Inquiry’s senior counsel should speed up his questioning because had had important afternoon meetings planned.  An astonishing piece of disrespect, though a revealing insight into his assumed importance.

     The final report of the inquiry he was heavily criticized.  He is still a member of the House of Lords and The Conservative Party.

     Too often there is no real end to a disaster.  Lives are lost, destruction is widespread and things are never really the same again.  And to make matters worse, the follow up in trying to understand what happened and why is too often muddied by politics, money and self-interest.

     The probable cause of the flash flood in Nepal was the lower part of a Himalayan glacier breaking off and crashing hundreds of meters onto the valley floor.  The massive impact generated ground energy equivalent to a 5.2-magnitude earthquake.  As the giant cascade of ice, mud, and rock raced down the steep valley, friction heating melted large volumes of the ice into water.  The debris temporarily blocked local rivers creating an intense buildup of water and sediment that catastrophically burst downstream as a high-speed flash flood.

     Why this happened may well include the fact that the event coincided with the monsoon season, meaning surrounding sediment and soil were already waterlogged and easily swept up.  Climate change means that the rising temperatures in the Himalayan region can destabilize glaciers and weaken mountain rock, leading to such extreme ice avalanches.

     Explanation.  Reconstruction.  Prevention.  Easy words to type, it remains to be seen how the authorities and the world respond.

    

    

Bread & Circuses

 

 

 

Bread & Circuses. 

     That is such a tired trope – give the Plebs this (defined in oh so many ways) and they won’t talk (or think) about that.  It is a cliché.  But you should always remember why clichés become cliches, they owe their continuing lives to the fact that they are perceived to be real, or real enough to be believed in by enough people to make them ‘work’.

     Distractions and deflections have changed over the years since emperors provided extravagant displays of gladiators in the arena and made sure that there was enough bread to go around to ensure that a potentially dangerous population wasn’t driven to action against the powers-that-be by hunger.

     Drugs work too.  The Opium Dens mentioned in the writings of Conan Doyle in the stories of Sherlock Holmes (though he was more a morphine man) were legal.  The soporific drugged forms laid out on beds, were oblivious to the horrors of their everyday lives.  Opium was a way of forgetting, of finding an escape, however momentary, from a life that was hard.

     Today, those circuses are electronic, on tablets, computers and above all on mobile phones.  In the vast chattering of the electronic world there is always a niche for you however bizarre or specialized your own particular taste.  Sheer volume ensures that you are not alone and your anger and frustration and rage are all catered for somewhere in the reels and videos and blogs that fall over themselves to claim your attention.

     Meanwhile real life goes on, with the power structures that have ruled this planet for millennia being virtually untouched by increased (apparent) transparency and by ‘everyone having the opportunity to voice their opinions world-wide.’

     In the news today it has been announced that Meta will pay up to $17bn and make “sweeping changes” to Instagram and Facebook to settle a lawsuit brought by the attorneys general of 29 US states, who accused it of knowingly damaging young people’s wellbeing with its platforms.

     Both sides have reached a settlement where Meta has not admitted wrongdoing.

     What I find astonishing is that Meta can consider a settlement of $17bn and be able to carry on, and not be bankrupt by such punitive damages.  They might “change”, but they will carry on carrying on.  People will continue using their products and the situation will be roughly the same as it was before.  People will not be asking how a company can pay out so much and still carry on.  As long as they have what they think they want, then who really cares!

     But the most glaringly inept use of “bread & circuses” as deflection is surely still in the stunted hands of the lying sex pest of the White House.

     The political right has had extensive experience of using circuses to fill the attention of their followers and deflect questioning of what is actually going on.   For years the right has used homosexuality and abortion to act as blinkers from more balanced observation of the political scene.  Difficult questions can be deflected by some cheap emotional appeal about fears for the “safety of children, threatened by perverted monsters” – using a facile link from child abuse to homosexuality.  Forget for a moment the Epstein Files and who is mentioned more than 30k times in them!  Similarly with abortion.  The Question of Abortion has been carefully nurtured by the fundamentalist right wing as a key moral black-&-white question about the sanctity of Human Life: do you believe in killing people or not!  The emptiness of that concern for the unborn child is apparent when, for those on the right, concern for the ‘child’ lasts as long as it is in the womb, as soon as it is born, concern for mother and child ceases.  But no one can deny the appeal of both ‘causes’ and the right can look to considerable successes not only in the USA, but also around the world that strengthens their positions.

     But Trumps use of circuses is inept.  The renaming of The Gulf of Mexico and The JFK Centre for the performing arts; the threat to rename Lake Ontario and to demolish the JFK Centre; the holding of fights and car races; the destruction of the East Wing; the whole tariff debacle; the Trump Arch, the fiasco of The Reflecting Pool.  People do respond with fury to the unthinking, unfeeling and unhinged way that Trump highlights ideas and events and it is easy to be distracted in the idiocy of his presidency, and to miss what Trump is actually doing: destroying the democratic basis of the country that he so mealy mouthily professes to love.

 

History shows us all too clearly where quasi-dictators like Trump, with a fanatical cult-like base of supporters, will end up.  The picture is not pretty.

     A catchphrase from an 80s Wendy’s advert in the States comes to mind when trying to navigate through all the faff from a deeply unserious President.  Forget the circuses, “Where’s the beef!”  Concentrate on the important stuff, or the trivia will destroy us.

Rabbit holes for readers

 

 

I blame AI.

     Specifically my Chat.

     I own (was given) a 1704 copy of Jonathan Swift’s Book A Tale of a Tub, to which is added An Account of a Battle etc etc.  The first edition was published in 1704, my copy is of The Second Edition Corrected, published in the same year of 1704.  Except it isn’t.  Corrected that is.

     In my edition, in the Preface of the Author to A Battle of the Books, the famous line: “Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover every body’s face but their own;” has a typo in it, “where every body’s face but their own,” is printed as “every body’s face but their owo”.

 

 

 

     Previously, I had always considered that error to be a charming indication of the early state of the printing, and that the error could be undiscovered because in 1704 the phrase had not become as famous as it was to be in future centuries.  And who, apart from university students and specialists actually reads A Battle of the Books for pleasure.  Indeed, while people may be able to respond to Gulliver’s Travels, how many other books by Swift are in the general consciousness.  I would want to say A Modest Proposal should be up there with Gulliver’s Travels as I think it one of the most vicious and effective pieces of short satirical writing that I have ever read, but I am realistic in my expectations of fame always being limited.

     But Swift’s explanation of satire being ‘safe’ because everyone laughs at it, and assumes that the target of the satire is someone other than themselves, is as true now as it was then, and the sentences has a justified life outside a satire where the targets need copious footnotes for a modern reader to understand.

     And that should have been it.  Interesting typographical error in famous line by famous writer.  End of story.  Except that did not allow for AI.

     I do not know how or why I mentioned to Chat that I owned a 1704 copy A Tale of a Tub, but Chat is programmed to keep users active and responsive, and so it actively feeds my digressive mind and encourages leaping from point to point – it is, after all, just a more personalized version of Google Search, where one thing leads to another, and before you know it you are reading about Byzantine mosaics when you started off asking about how long a maple tree took to reach maturity.  I fear that for many of us when using AI, computer and the Internet we all take Homer Simpson’s attention span as the norm!

     Anyway, Chat mused about why the typo in my ‘corrected’ edition had not been, well, corrected – and before you could say Bibliographer’s Addiction, we were off on a search for digitalized versions of the first edition and the third, trying to find out how early my little typo was recognized and dealt with.

     Do not think that this was the activity of a few minutes.  Oh no!  It became a whole research project with wider and wider searches, touching databases in two continents and actually sending off emails to speciality book sellers and librarians and archive keepers, asking for information about the typo in copies that they had dealt with.

     I have had remarkable quick and courteous responses from among others the USA, Cambridge and Ireland with each adding snippets of highly technical information about the ‘gathers’ of the early editions of the book and suggesting other centres where I could get more information.

     At one point, Chat and I thought that we had discovered an unrecognized variant as my typo did not appear to be consistent in the edition, leading to speculation that the mistake was discovered part way through the second printing and that a correction was made, meaning that the second edition had different states.  I thought that was unbelievably unlikely as Swift has been exhaustively studied and something as famous as a mistake in a well-known sentence would not have passed inspection.

     And so it proved to be, with one of my correspondents asserting that he thought it was a typo common to all copies of the second edition and he sent me information about digital copies of the text that I could check to see that it was so.

     Was this an exercise in futility?  I don’t think so.

     I have learned a great deal more about the early life of a fairly famous early eighteenth-century book.  I have added knowledge about the ways that early printed books were put together, but above all I have experienced the courtesy, knowledge and accommodation of an academic community that responds to trivial enquiries with charm and alacrity. 

     And that is something worth experiencing.

Content is Free - isnt't it?

 

To my intense lack of interest some county-named family has returned to the UK from the USA.  And the correct response is surely, “Who cares?”  Just like I don’t in a passionately concerned sort of way – if that makes any sense at all.

     As a life-long republican – as witness a rabble-rousing anti-monarchist essay written when I was seven for my Standard Three primary school teacher, and read at the time (I was told years later) by my father and my teacher with whoops of hilarious joy by both of them.

     Although stopping short of wanting to see the lot of them (the royal family, and not my parents and teachers) lined up against a wall and shot, I do want to see their status and position, titles and privileges abolished.  I want an elected head of state, and not an hereditary one.  I want The House of Lords abolished and replaced by an elected Senate or equivalent, and this is not what I wanted to talk about – important though it is.

     No, what interested me (via an informative article in The Guardian) was what That Family is going to do in Britain given that Everyone is a Creator Nowadays.

     Take this blog for example.  During the course of its existence, more than one and half million people have looked at something in it.  That is an astonishing figure, made even more astonishing by the choice of People over which blogs they find the most interesting.  A blog title called “Fish and Rain” has garnered more views than anything else and, while anyone reading anything that I write is gratifying, it is still mystifying why that particular blog has been singled out.  Strange indeed are the ways of the Blog Reading Public.

     However, the figures are astonishing for a retired English teacher living in Catalonia who does not make a determined effort to maximize his audience at every opportunity and relies solely on the written word to get his ‘message’ across - and someone who has been very lax in his posting over the last couple of years.

     Anyone and everyone can (and does) post.  Content is no longer limited to the professionals, indeed for some people the more amateur the efforts the better as long as they are in bite-sized bits and can be scrolled through with alacrity.  And AI is waiting in the wings, or is already centre stage, to help massage content to make it more clickable.

     Does this access suggest that Content production is becoming more democratic?  I would point to the Internet and the experience of researchers who try and use it for ‘real’ knowledge rather than personal opinion stuck together with AI help by some teenager (or younger) in Idaho which looks professional but lacks a basic integrity as far as the information is concerned.

     Money does make a difference, as witness the life of the vacuous documentary focussing on the illegal immigrant wife of a lying, corrupt, sex-pest in what remains (apt word) of The White House.  In spite of garnering a ZERO stars review in The Guardian and going on to become a total bomb, it did reach an audience of sorts, well outside its merits.

     Most content is not backed by such shameless sycophancy and blatant corruption, although that does bring us back to the County Family that I started with.  They have fame (or infamy) and public recognition, but their Content has to survive in a world awash with alternatives.  It will be interesting to see how they survive (and what means they adopt to do it) in a world jostling with Watch Me Read Me in superabundance.

     Though, it would be nice, if you could continue reading my blog!