In future ages people will look back at the beginning of the twenty first century and laugh with incredulous contempt at the number, range and sinewy complexity of power leads with which we entwined ourselves to keep all our precious gadgets alive and kicking. Perhaps it will not be an age but a couple of years when technology, which at present allows suitably adjusted devices simply to rest on a power source to recharge their batteries, will have advanced so that the devices suck power out of the air.
I for one cannot wait for such a dawning.
I sit here in my little office on the third floor with my feet in a writhing mass of leads. Some are connected, some are not. Some I know and others I dare not pull out because I have been unable to trace their length to a source, or rather to a “spring”, the source after all is the plug and I can see that easily enough. I have a morbid fear that if I simply go about pulling things out then one broken connection will cause universal chaos and darkness will cover the face of the earth: or at least that part of it that I inhabit. And we all know that if you close down some gadgets without the necessary rituals and mystic pressing of knobs, keys and screens they may very well deign never to start again. We all know the value of backing things up, but I doubt that this knowledge has actually led to productive action.
Except of course in the case of photographs which, now existing in digital form seem to make their presence felt in every entity (the personification is intentional) that uses electricity. There must be a card reader slot on the hoover somewhere, but I don’t use it enough to have found out where it is precisely.
My concern with the leads is because I have started to do some work for the next year in school. The work I am doing of course is not the most pressing but is the most interesting – and that approach works for me!
I made the resolve to Start Work while being flayed alive by the on-shore, off-shore and long-shore drift winds which seemed to blow simultaneously from all possible directions on the compass. This did at least mean that there was an even build up of stand along all exposed parts of the body – and September being in sight it meant that I was afflicted with the particularly British syndrome of “end of holiday different colour desire”. It is almost as if the desperation which is natural state for any thinking teacher to be in when the start of school is less than a month away (which if you think about it means only a few days at the end of July and the beginning of August) will encourage the suns rays to act faster and more profoundly.
At least being sandpapered by the velocity of particles shot at the body allows the Puritan Conscience to take satisfaction in the fact that indolent lying on the beach is having its compensation in pain!
To be fair I was improving the shining hour by listening to Shostakovich’s 11th Symphony in G minor (The year 1905) on my i-pod. I think that the first movement is one of the most lyrically beautiful of any symphony I’ve heard – and if you can still think that while being sand blasted while people around you play football and shriek at their families while the waves crash on the shore then I think the music has got some quality!
The symphony develops into something which verges on (!) the bombastic and you can certainly tell, when listening to it that Shostakovich was an accomplished composer of film scores.
When the symphony finished I selected “Absolute Gold” as a suitable follow on and listened with great satisfaction to “Heaven for Everyone” by Queen, followed by “Because You Loved Me” by Celine Dion then “Missing” by Everything But the Girl and we decided to go when I had reached “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” by Deep Blue Something.
It is at times like this that I wonder whether my liberality of musical taste is not merely uncritical sensationalism. I hope.
I have just looked up the lyrics to the song "Breakfast at Tiffany's" to see what I had missed and there is a “discussion” from which my favourite comment was, “i think this song is a Classic song as it has some sort of meaning in our lives in one way or another.”
It is difficult to fault that sort of analysis!
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