Words

Lionel Shriver identifies some words and phrases she dislikes here.

I don't disagree with her, but if you really pinned me down to choosing only one word that I would prefer never to see again, I would have to pick "ontological". Try this piece and tell me that you don't begin to dread "ontological" looming ahead for the three hundredth time, yet another Becher's Brook and you stuck in the Grand National of pompous pronouncement where "foreground" has somehow become a verb.  

A Poor Chisel

I read this passage in today's Telegraph and wondered if we have learned anything at all since 1914: 

"The current job of the Ukrainian infantry is basically to sit in trenches and get shelled. Those who survive the barrage must then engage in firefights with approaching infantry and tanks. The survivors of that encounter then wait for the next artillery barrage. And so on. 

Their Russian enemies have it even worse. Accounts from prisoners of war, pro-Russian military bloggers and public quarrels between Yevgeny Prigozhin, the Wagner Group’s chief, and the army command paint a picture of apocalyptic casualty rates, suicidal human wave assaults, and piteous shortages of ammo and kit."

I wondered how to head this post and only came up with cliches about smashed innocence and a lost golden age. Rejecting these, I went searching for sayings by the famous on the subject of war. Several caught my attention:

"Peace is not absence of conflict, it is the ability to handle conflict by peaceful means." ~ Ronald Reagan

"Wars begin when you will, but they do not end when you please." ~ Niccolo Machiavelli. (Vladimir Putin must be beginning to recognise this truth, surely).

"We are advocates of the abolition of war, we do not want war; but war can only be abolished through war." ~ Mao Zedong (this one struck me as worthy of Orwell at his most satiric)

"Peace cannot be kept by force; it can only be achieved by understanding." ~ Albert Einstein

"We have war when at least one of the parties to a conflict wants something more than it wants peace." ~ Jeane Kirkpatrick

In the end though, this is the one I liked the best:

"War is a poor chisel to carve out tomorrow." ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

Consolation

 I went through a brief phase of being outraged when A.A.Gill announced he'd killed an ape to see what it would feel like. Then I realised that I had fallen into his trap and reacted precisely in the way he hoped. So I went back to enjoying his writing, which has a kind of mad acerbic courage and also makes me laugh.

Now he is dead, I am running out of new things by him. I was therefore glad this morning to discover a volume of bracing advice columns he wrote in response to real or imagined letters from readers.

This one I think could or should have been addressed to the author of Spare, although at the time Gill died he could not have known what a psychobabbling nitwit that person was going to become - and of course university has not been part of his "life journey":

Toys Abound

I was in a doctor's waiting room with a six-month-old relative recently. Minutes after arriving there, while waiting for the baby's mother's name to be called, it had dawned on us that we had forgotten to bring any of the baby's toys.

How would I amuse the baby without the usual gang, we wondered.  Without the dear little pink rabbit that had been ordered online and unexpectedly turned out on arrival to be no bigger than a hand. Without the ranks of Beanie babies preserved in a pristine state for 25 years by the baby's aunt. Without the strange furry creature with a long curling tail, a face like an Alison Utley hedgehog and tiny human hands that always make me think of the Queen's remark when Giles Brandreth pointed out to her that Rupert Bear has the head of a bear but the hands of a human: 

"I’m sorry you told me that. Some things are best left unknown, don’t you think?"

Oh well. We would have to manage. The baby's mother headed off to her consultation, and the baby and I looked around. There was a grey abstract painting with splashes of glued-on-gravel. There was a glass case containing herbal remedies marketed by the doctor. There was a flat screen television riveted to the wall and not turned on.

Not easy to get much excitement from that lot.

But there was the mask that I was supposed to be wearing but had taken off because it made my glasses mist over. The baby, with the delicate care of a newly learnt skill, closed thumb and index finger on one corner of the blue papery cloth of the mask itself. Then, with equal concentration, she clasped one of the mask's soft white loops between the thumb and index finger of her other hand.

She lifted the hand that held the loop. She stared in wonder. This wasn't like ribbon or cord or any thin stringy thing that she had encountered so far in life. It stretched. And, look, if you let it go, it bounced back into place. Let's try that again. And again. And again.

A quick glance at me - without words her huge eyes convey that this is amazing.

Back to testing the limits of stretch and spring.

And then a man entered. He went over to a small bowl I hadn't noticed that sat on a table underneath the television. He scooped up a handful of wrapped sweets and took a seat on the other side of the room.

The baby watched him closely as he moved about, and then she returned to her investigation  of soft elastic. Ping. Ping. Ping.

And then, such excitement - the man unwrapped a sweet, and the rattle of the foil wrapper caught the baby's attention. What was that amazing noise?

The baby stared in the man's direction, but the noise had already ended  Back once more to ping, ping, ping, ping, ping. 

Until another sweet paper rustle. The baby's head jerked up again. She looked over at what she thought must be its source. He was absolutely still now, his attention absorbed by his telephone. No further noise or movement from his direction. What on earth could it have been. 

And so it went on - a mask and some sweet papers provided twenty minutes of absorption. When the world is new, almost nothing is dull, it seems.

When the baby's mother came back and asked if there'd been any problem, I explained that it had all been fine as the baby had found some pingers.

At which the baby's mother raised an eyebrow. Pingers, I now know have a specific meaning. Pingers are most unsuitable for babies, no matter how desperate you are to entertain them. Just stick with simple things.

I Don't Quite Get It

Going through old photographs, I found this from the Times of April 2020. It seems there was a time, not long ago at all, when even professional journalists could not tell the difference between Hungary and Ukraine.

This only intensified my confusion about what we are doing in Ukraine. 

While it is clear Putin is a thug and a monster and Ukraine has been attacked without having done anything that could be interpreted as aggressive provocation, what I don't understand is why this conflict is being treated so differently to the conflicts in other countries where in recent decades equally unfair attacks have been made - and in some cases the aggressor has been Putin, just like now. 

Somehow, the whole of the West has been whipped up into wild outrage by this particular war, as opposed to all the many cruel unfair wars in the world that we usually turn a blind eye to - in fact, simultaneous with expressing our horror at what is happening in Ukraine, we are turning the blindest of blind eyes to poor old Armenia, under regular and unjustified attack from Azerbaijan. Azerbaijan, in fact, at least, according to Ursula von der Leyen, is a reliable and trustworthy partner, not like brutal Russia at all (except it is). 

So why here, why now, do we suddenly find our (selective) moral compass? And most especially, why here? I mean, when Boris Johnson wrote in his usual bombastic way, "What conceivable grounds can there be for delay" in providing more assistance and weaponry for the Ukrainians to fight back against Russia, was I the only one to think, "Er, mate, the fact that you are taking on a madman with a vast nuclear arsenal who, if driven too hard, might decide to use those weapons, because he is cruel, blood thirsty and completely mad and if we leave him nothing to lose who knows what will happen."

Am I a dreadful appeaser? Or is there something to be said for noting that Hitler did not have nuclear weapons and Putin does, and therefore the situation between Russia and Ukraine might deserve a slightly more delicate strategy than simply going in hard, hard, hard?

The Ukrainians are in the right, no doubt about it, but so many others are - and have been - in similar skirmishes. Why have we all suddenly found our morality for this war but no others? And, having found our compass, are we sure the best solution to what is a horrific problem is to goad the bear?

I sound pusillanimous. I am. But I am also suspicious, simply because our response to what is happening in Ukraine strikes me as very much the exception to the rule, and I would like to know why that is.

And somehow I don't feel tremendously encouraged by the news that there has just been a purge of very senior people in the Ukrainian government who were corrupt - not because the purge isn't good news but because the news only came yesterday, suggesting to me that we have all been going round thinking this is a fight between good and bad, when actually it's a fight between not that great and terrible, in terms of the leaders. 

Would the purge have happened, I wonder, if the Ukrainian leadership hadn't been forced into it by us, its new allies? Who are we dealing with really - not the civilians but those who run things in the Ukrainian government? If Ukraine wins and the immediate aftermath is not that we are all drenched in radioactive fallout, will the corrupt individuals purged yesterday come sliding back and resume their business? Are we being encouraged into a huge and endless war because of some other agenda, or is it just that Ukrainian civilians are more attractive to us than those in the Caucasus or Armenia? Is Putin really a threat to the entire free world or is he just an elderly thuggish Russian with stupid dreams that he cannot actually sustain or even fulfil? 

Icky Fingers

When I was five or six my brother and I were very interested in the weekly Top Ten countdown on the radio. I can still remember our bafflement and disgust as week after week for almost two months Frank Ifield yodelling a song called "I Remember You" remained stuck at No. 1. What could it mean? Who were the people who could bear to listen to this appalling noise?

My memory has it that we wanted Ferry Cross the Mersey to knock off Frank Ifield - but it turns out it came out years later. If it wasn't that, perhaps it was The House of the Rising Sun. But, no: that too came years afterwards. So it must have been the Beatles with Love Me Do that we were barracking for.  I didn't think I liked that song much, but it seems that long ago a three-foot two version of myself cared about it very, very much.

In connection with our Top Ten mania, on Saturday mornings my brother and I used to go with our friends from nextdoor, Charlie and David, to the Chelsea Record Shop, on the Kings Road, almost next to the Chelsea Town Hall. Charlie and David had more pocket money than us (and television, and free access to sweets, such astonishing riches), and they would buy singles. I did not have enough money for singles - at least not genuine ones. However, there was a product that I could afford - a record that came out every week with the top ten songs on it, but all sung by people who, despite their best efforts, did not sound quite like the real thing.

There is nothing in my life that has been a bigger waste of money than those imitation hit records. I succumbed to the temptation of buying them three times, before realising they were just completely no good. Actually, I think I realised they were no good right from the first time I bought one - but the next couple of times I was genuinely interested to try to work out what it was that made them inferior. They were so very nearly like the originals. No one sang off tune. They had the lyrics and the tempo perfect, their singers had similar voices to those of the singers they were imitating. But they mysteriously failed - entirely - every time.

I remembered those records when someone showed me some of the photographs of non-existent people that artificial intelligence is beginning to produce. Here are a couple of examples:

They look remarkably good, at first glance. But look a little more closer - just like those fake top ten records, there is something not quite right about these fake people. It's their hands. What on earth is going on with their hands?

I find it reassuring actually. As someone on Twitter said:

Someone replied with this account of robots pitted against US Marines that was also quite cheering.

On the other hand, (ho ho), if Dora Carrington's portrait of Lytton Strachey is accurate, perhaps AI photograph generators have simply had Strachey-related data fed into their programming:

Only time will tell: will robots gain the upper hand (ho ho ho ho) or are their barriers we cannot get over? I grew up in an age when we were led to believe that humans could solve everything, but it's been 50 years and there still seems no solution to the problem of storing energy for any length of time in batteries. Either robots and artificial intelligence, as human-made phenomena, will reach certain limits and go no further, or they will go beyond those limits, not thanks to human efforts but surpassing them. I pray that the first option will prevail,  that robots and AI will reach the limits that we are capable of and go no further and that human life will meander on in its messy, muddled, mostly five-fingered way.

Ps: coincidentally (or because AI is already infinitely better than I'd imagined) straight after writing this, two articles on the subject of AI turned up in the ever flowing stream that is Twitter. Here is one. And here is the other. 

The Slow Lane

 On the subject of supermarket automation, this is cheering, if true: