Gremlins of departure II

After a disturbed night of non-sleep at Newhaven docks serenaded by the revving of departing trucks at 3am. followed by the gentle throb of refrigeration units emanating lorries booked, like us, on the 9am ferry, it felt truly liberating to be chugging slowly past Brighton and Beachy Head; la belle France beckoned. Aspects of our departure were pure 'Groundhog Day'; seemingly we were destined to repeat the vicissitudes of last September this year, I wrote the following on the blog 12 months ago in the exactly the same DFDS ferry cafeteria as I am sitting in now:

"So here we are, escaped once more from the Disunited Kingdom of Great Brexit and Northern Ire-land, a few months of sunshine and sanity beckons."

Same as it ever was...same as it ever was...

What has changed? Very little, apart from this year's autumn trip had been cut down to a quick dash for a month to the Costa Brava planned on the assumption that building work on our dining room extension was due to begin in October. We learned last week that our builder has fallen over and cracked his ribs. This delays the project for a month, but the option of extending our trip has now been stymied by all the other exciting things we have now pencilled in for October, like visits to the dental hygienist, a domestic service for the motorhome and the car bodywork repair following a minor bump in Morrison's car park. So much to look forward to on our return!

Then there's October 31st where allegedly we will go to bed as Europeans then wake up the next day reincarnated as extras in Passport to Pimlico... or not.

Aside from national gremlins of departure, we seem to have been assailed by some of our own. l have noted this phenomenon before, remarkably uneventful weeks drift by until the moment of departure arrives, then a clutch of small glitches occur all designed to make the simple act of leaving the house tricky and stressful.

Glitch one: the evening before we were due to leave Gill was slicing an onion on our glass chopping board. Mysteriously the thing shattered and exploded into thousands of tiny fragments; some shards zooming out of the kitchen door and around to corner to deposit themselves under the dining room table. Uncanny. Miraculously Gill was unscathed. This was an omen....

Next day we fetched the Moho from storage to finish packing. All went well until we came to load the bikes. Somehow last night a half full tin of emulsion had leapt off the garage shelves of its own accord and splattered splodges of white across the bikes' front wheels and the panniers. Cleaning up delayed us by an hour/ Consequently the final stages of loading the van coincided with the arrival of the forecast thundery downpours. After a thorough soaking we opted to delay our departure until after lunch.

Splat!

This gave me ample time to sit on the house phone listening to depressingly perky electro-pop as I waited in the Talk Talk customer help-line queue. The reason - all morning calls on our land-line had interrupted our packing Most calls these days are from robots offering support after your 'recent accident'. The latest flurry was equally robotic but slightly more sinister. Two messages advised that our internet connection was to be disconnected by our provider in 24hrs due to illegal activity, then a final call when a ten seconds silence was followed by a spooky voice that simply said 'goodbye' followed by a sampled click - like you used to get when a caller on a dial phone hung-up. Yes, of course it was all cyber-bollocks, but when aimed at you it is difficult to simply brush it off. I decided to inform Talk Talk - our ISP, that their customers were being targeted.

This proved tricky; like many customer helplines, the aim of Talk Talk's is to ensure customers never get to talk to a human. The first number I tried simply rang out, After ten minutes of looping Muzak devoid even of the usual monotone assuring me that an 'advisor will be with you soon' I decided to try another number

I got through straightaway. A machine asked me to summarise in a couple of words what I wanted to talk about. "Nuisance calls" I said slowly and clearly as if addressing a toddler. The machine churned out a pre-recorded message listing all the features that Talk Talk had introduced to minimise nuisance calls. After a few minutes of this I hoped I might get to speak to a human; momentarily that seemed to be on the cards; another jolly automaton quipped, "It seems you need to chat to an advisor". A phone rang twice, the line went silent, then a different robot intoned "we apologise due to technical difficulties this service is not available.

I can be doggedly determined. Which is how I came to to find myself texting Cherry. She may have been a robot or a human, or a cyborg mix of the two - a Talk Talk human viewing my text chat, then firing off preset responses to my questions topped and tailed with pleasantries and just enough customisation to almost convince me that my concerns mattered.

I was reassured that the nuisance call had nothing to do with Talk Talk The information about 'safecall' I had listened to ten minutes ago was repeated in written form including the code numbers I needed to activate the service on my land-line. Progress? I duly followed the instructions. In some distant call centre a phone rang twice, the line went silent, then yet another robot intoned "we apologise due to technical difficulties this service is not available."

Does any of this matter, I asked myself, phone in hand staring out of the window at the garden, as squirrel, filched peanuts from a dangling bird-feeder. The actual world carries on regardless whatever the machinations of the virtual. Should we simply brush the the gremlins away and concentrate on reality? I wondered.

Question - do our garden squirrels behave more sensibly than Boris?

Sadly, it's not as simple as that. In Western culture at least, the virtual has become interwoven with the actual to the point where fact and fiction are no longer simple antonyms. How do you begin to make sense of a post-truth world? Two books I have read recently attempt to offer a way forward. The one I finished yesterday, 'Utopia for Realists' asserts we can through collective action build a fairer, more sustainable world, that tried and tested strategies exist to deliver humanity from the looming cyber-dystopia.

Bye Bye Blighty

Reflected in the smoked glass screening between the ferry's cafeteria tables, Brighton and Beachy Head slowly slipped out of sight. My brain clicked from departure to travel mode. Suddenly I felt more content.

Time to settle down to the tome I've chosen to read on this trip. My son, Matthew, bought Mark Fisher's 'K-punk' for me last Christmas. It is an 800 page compendium of excerpts from the mid-noughties K-punk blog. It looks at post-punk and pulp popular culture from the point of view of a Marxist activist with a background in cultural studies, critical theory and a penchant for Ballardian dystopias.

Not exactly a page turner, but up my street. I've more or less given up on reading novels these days, which is unsurprising given that at the moment truth is definitely stranger than fiction. I may be old fashioned, but I do think it is possible to distinguish between the two. Well, Mark Fisher can, which is why it is worthwhile making the effort to read him.