Thursday 24th November

At one point in my life I became more than somewhat obsessed by Virginia Woolf and her writing; it was when I was most alone, after my Paris episode, when for a couple of years I felt I was living in some sort of a cupboard, just blanketing out most of what was going on around me, as some sort of self imposed penance.  I devoured ‘The Voyage Out’ and ‘Mrs Dalloway’ and then turned ‘To The Lighthouse’ and ‘Orlando’, but after reading ‘The Waves’ I had begun to run out of steam, and apart from reading ‘A Room of One’s Own’ a few years later I haven’t bothered to go back to her.  I suppose I became Virginia-ed out, as they say nowadays.

She isn’t so very popular anymore, but you still find a few of her novels in Penguins in most semi-decent bookshops, so she is still read by some people, though I suspect that this may be more because they have to, on some English Literature course, than through pure choice.  The whole Bloomsbury Group seems not to hold the fascination over the young that they used to in the sixties and seventies.  We were introduced to them at school, by our Art teacher, old Jack Trodd, who came in three afternoons a week to take the older girls for ‘Art Appreciation’, which I found far more interesting than actually drawing or attempting to paint still-life bowls of fruit, which was what passed for Art at our school.  He used to love to waffle on about different movements in Art, and was largely responsible for my initial interest in the Impressionists, and one day he got onto the subject of The Bloomsbury Set, a loose group of artists and writers and even an economist or two, who seemed to share ideas about Art, Literature and Society in general.  They were incredibly influential in the late twenties and thirties, and I have kept up my interest in them over the years and still look out for new books about them.  Virginia Woolf was probably the most famous writer in the Group, and certainly I enjoyed her work far more than say Lytton Strachey and in her own way she changed the very meaning of the idea of a novel.  Before Virginia, novels tended to be fairly straight forward narratives with a beginning, a middle and an end, and some actual story to tell, but she seemed to create the whole book out of the consciousness of her characters and what they are feeling, drifting off on tangents of thought and sometimes losing the reader altogether, so that you had to backtrack and reread a few pages to work out what is maybe happening.  But the writing is so beautiful, poetic and expressive without being at all soppy, especially Orlando, which tells the story of a boy who becomes a man over several centuries and lives without appearing to age significantly, even changing sex into a woman at one point.  And of course Virginia was quite repressed sexually and apparently her marriage was open to the point of her having a long and passionate affair with another married woman Vita Sackville-West, possibly the great love of her life.

I am not sure why I became obsessed with her, if only for a relatively short time, possibly she was the sort of writer I always wanted to be, maybe I was just infatuated with the whole idea of this wealthy but liberated free-thinking woman being able to so freely express thoughts and emotions, while I was living my life at that time as a virtual recluse, of my own making I hasten to add, and so immersing myself in this alter-ego was some sort of substitute for actually living myself.  And in a way, although I stopped reading her I have always been fascinated by her, as a person as much as a writer.  Maybe you never do get over your early infatuations, with either people or writers, a part of them is still inside your head and your heart forever.

Wednesday 23rd November

I have a friend, Liz, who works in Retail – she is actually an Area Sales Manager now, but for a few years she was on the shop floor.  She works for a luxury skincare product which is sold exclusively in high end stores such as Harrods, Selfridges and John Lewis.  She was telling me about how she had to train her staff to engage with the customer, to establish eye contact, and to start a conversation, all in order to break down any barriers, perceived or otherwise, and to help sell the product.  She asked me in passing if I usually chatted to sales assistants, and I had to think about it for a moment, and my answer was no, I did not.  “Not even in Starbucks, say, when buying a coffee, don’t you ask them if they are having a pleasant day, etc?”  “Well, no, quite the opposite really, I just ask for my coffee, and decline their habitual invite to buy a snack, then when they repeat my order ‘a grande latte’ I correct them by politely repeating my original order for a medium latte, thank-you.” And it is true, I don’t just chat to people I do not know.  I don’t have that free and easy manner with strangers; it isn’t that in any way I consider myself above them, or any of that nonsense, it simply never occurs to me.

But this conversation set me wondering, was I so different from everyone else; had my upbringing somehow made me more reserved than most people; had Grandma succeeded in her task of bringing me up to be a typical middle class snob ?  I must admit that when I first started working I was very reserved and found it almost intimidating to engage in idle chit-chat, it was more that I didn’t see the point in just exchanging pleasantries rather than having anything meaningful to say, and had found all too often that when you tried to turn the conversation to anything serious you were met with a stare, as if you had made some sort of faux-pas by actually wanting to discuss something that might matter. And I think that this is the nub of the matter with me; I am more than happy to talk to anyone about something that I care about, but as to whether they are having a nice day or how rainy the weather is when I don’t even know them seems quite pointless.  Surely they must know that I don’t really care and am only saying these things to be polite, but what if they consider me to be impolite to not say this kind of thing.  So, I decided to do a bit of people watching.

In the queue at Starbucks, or when in Waitrose I started to observe other people a bit closer, and listening in, to see if they were more communicative than I, and the amazing thing was that hardly anyone did actually chat to people serving in shops, even in John Lewis, except to ask on which floor children’s clothes were or some other enquiry.  Absolutely nobody in Starbucks chatted, except for a perfunctory hello, or a query about whether their products contained nuts or dairy products, there was simply no small talk.  Maybe this is just a London effect, and in smaller communities, people do chit chat with strangers, but London is all I know.

So, who was right, Liz or I?  I suspect that both of us are in our own way; it may simply be that for people like Liz, who are dealing with the general public, in effect people they do not know, all day long, it is perfectly natural to talk to them, to break the ice with a polite enquiry about their day or the weather, but for myself, who, even in my working days, was never talking to people I did not know, it is just as natural to keep oneself to oneself.  I do sometimes wish I could be a bit more like Liz though, maybe I will try it tomorrow when ordering my Starbucks, we’ll see.

Tuesday 22nd November

On Sunday morning there was a splendid fog; a really dense white-out of a fog, not quite a pea-souper but quite superb all the same.  As soon as I looked out of my window and saw this thick blanket of whiteness I was enthralled, captivated, and quickly getting dressed I went out walking in the park.

Not being a car-driver, I suppose I have a quite different perspective of fog; rather than a dangerous element to be avoided or requiring extra caution, I find it a beautiful and strangely affecting phenomenon. I especially love the silence it seems to bring with it, and again maybe this is slightly illusory, but it is as if time stands still, or at any rate slows down in a fog.  I think this is because one of your basic senses, spatial awareness, is so dulled and dented, that you almost enter a new world, one of limited vision and tighter horizons, so your world is suddenly reduced to the few yards you can see and hear and smell ahead of you.

And here, walking alone before eight on a Sunday, here in the heart of the metropolis you could just as well be in a small copse or a completely unpopulated island or in a fairy tale, or like Titania in your own mid-Autumn days dream a million miles away from reality.

I especially love the way that trees gently loom into view, being at first just the hint of a shadow, a pale grey against the blankest white and as you approach, they unfold themselves from the mist, and drip their silent Autumn wetness on you.  The very bark seems alive, especially the variegated blotches of the maples and the shiny skin of the silver birches, and as you pass they silently fold themselves back into oblivion again.

And not a soul was around, and even the dog-walkers, usually so active early on, were kept indoors by this alien atmosphere, and I seemed to have the whole park to myself.  But even this was maybe an illusion too; maybe there were hundreds of silent walkers out in the park and our receded vision kept us unaware of each other, each hermetically sealed in our opaque worlds, where even sound seems muffled, and the smell of the fog is so dense that we are one with the mist as we too drift aimlessly along, with no sense of direction at all as the clammy chill seeps through our North Face jackets and into the very fibre of our being.

And the usual sun’s burning up the morning haze never happened, and we were more or less shrouded in this dense miasma all day long.  As I say, wonderful; a momentary lapse of nature and suddenly how we lose so much of our sense of importance.  Every year around this time the atmospheric conditions are just right and down comes the fog, sometimes in early December, but this year in late November and I can let myself loose and go walking again in this truly splendid fog.

Monday 21st November

They say; scientists and nutritionists, that the post-war diet, with rationing still rigidly enforced was the best start to life for the post war generation, and that they are consequently healthier than the generations that followed.  Well, we were privileged; at least while we were in Cyprus, and though I never ate with the grown-ups, but downstairs in the kitchen, I am sure we were never troubled by rationing at all.  We left when I was seven, so I cannot really remember any of the food of that time, but I surely can remember the food we had while we lived in Putney, and it was pretty boring.  Bland is the best word to describe it, even onions used to upset Grandma’s constitution, so that eternal standby was used only sparingly.  I had school dinners, and they at least were nourishing and full of flavour, but at home the food was dull as ditchwater, and so repetitive, you could actually tell the day of the week by what was for tea.  Sunday was always roast, and almost always a piece of beef, which used to be overcooked almost to oblivion.  Strange to think that chicken, now the cheapest of meats, was very expensive in the sixties, and was a real treat, whereas beef was far more commonplace than it has become today.  Monday, we would have the remains of Sunday’s beef served cold with mashed potato and maybe cabbage.  We didn’t even have the excitement of pickles to spice it up; Grandma never gave them house room. Tuesday would be sausages, or a pork chop, fried in lard I might add.  Wednesday and Thursday we had something on toast, usually cheese or eggs or sometimes warmed up pilchards from a tin. Friday was fish, and usually poached in milk, and pretty tasteless, but sometimes we had that gorgeous smoked yellow haddock, a real treat.  My mother slowly took over the culinary reins from Grandma’s unsteady hands and did at least introduce a few different vegetables into our diet.  We always seemed constrained by money, or lack of it, and eating was never considered a luxury, but an unfortunate and costly necessity.

After I started working, I would try out new ideas I had read up in the Sunday Times Review, but Grandma was never too enthusiastic about my Quiche Lorraine or Chicken a-la-king, though my mother seemed to enjoy the unpredictability of the thing.

Then when I met Jennifer and her crowd I was suddenly introduced to real pasta and exotic items such as veal and sun-dried tomato, which you never really saw in the shops at all.  For several years you would have to seek out small delicatessens where these items could be bought, but now the supermarkets are literal cornucopias, spilling out all sorts of food from every corner of the globe.  Nothing appears to be unavailable, though it is sometimes on a bottom shelf or you have to ask an assistant for it, so now you can follow any recipe by those TV celebrity chefs and you know you will be able to get them at any decent sized superstore.

The latest innovation though is the total elimination of real cooking; there is an amazing variety of ready cooked microwavable meals of every variety, Indian, Chinese, Thai and Italian, and it is all so easy, and even if you suspect, as I do, that they may be full of salt and sugar and e-numbers, none of us really cares.  The irony is that real cooking programmes have never been so popular; as we sit down to watch them with our tray on our lap, tucking into yet another micro-waved ready meal.

Sunday 20th November

As you know I am a great fan of Art, especially paintings.  I quite like drawings and can appreciate the skill involved, but they are all too often quite one-dimensional and are in any case often only sketches for the real thing – paintings.  I can remember discussions that often spilled into arguments with Adrian, as he said that one shouldn’t be seduced by colour, but concentrate on tone and texture and the inter-play between light and shadow.  Well, I always have been seduced by colour, especially in those early Impressionist paintings which seem to burst with vibrancy and light; a new way of seeing indeed.  There have been several schools of painting, or movements, since the Impressionists, and one I could never learn to like was the Cubists, and the leading light of that and its most famous exponent was Pablo Picasso.

And it’s not as if he cannot paint; I spent a wonderful afternoon in a small gallery in Barcelona a few years back, which was exhibiting hundreds of drawings and sketches and quite a few paintings by the young Pablo, and they are superb.  Mostly very realistic and incredibly well executed.  And I simply adore his blue period, where his use of that colour (and pink too) was brilliant, and not all of these paintings are simple realistic interpretations, many are almost abstract workings of an idea, but are held together by the wonderful brushwork and balance of the compositions.  In many ways he was copying and refining the Impressionists work, such as outlining in black, made famous of course by van Gogh.  It was with Cubism that he began to lose me I am afraid.  He was heavily influenced by Georges Braque, and together they created a whole new way of painting; it was an attempt to represent the three dimensional world on a flat canvas.  Many of their early works are still good to look at, with their softer colours, and refracting surfaces and the things they are painting, the subject matter, is still obvious and recognizable.  But I find that Picasso’s later works are mostly ridiculous, with their split faces and simple, almost cartoon-like blocks of colour, and scrolls for hair, and fat short limbs. I find they simply distort rather than reveal the beauty of the subject, but then I don’t really think that he was seeking beauty, but what he considered a deeper truth lying beneath the surface.  And this is where I find we differ; I love Art for its attempt at distilling beauty and perfection, especially from the world around us.  To me it is saying, ‘Look, I may simply be a person, but I am attempting to show you a moment of beauty I have captured in paint, or maybe a photograph, or a piece of music, or a poem or a story. I am trying to show you that this is the way the world is, this is the human condition.’  I think Picasso is more cynical, he is saying, ‘You may think you know what something looks like, but believe me, there is something else lurking just beneath the surface, and it is my particular task, to show it to you.’

Of course, I could be totally wrong, and there are plenty who find all of Picasso’s paintings wonderful. Maybe they are all right, who knows, but it doesn’t stop me loving his early work,

but really disliking the later ones. You decide.

Saturday 19th November

Oh, you deadliest of sins, Gluttony – indeed, which is different from Greed, which comes later. And the next town of Anna and her sister the dancer Anna’s journey was Philadelphia, though again why that city should be singled out for such a sin I have no idea.

Gluttony; one wonders historically if this was such a common sin; maybe amongst the rich, especially when one reads about late Victorian and Edwardian banquets, where every variety of cooked and cold meats and pies and puddings were in abundance, and the rich rarely worked either, so over-eating and obesity must have been quite common, in any case gout (supposedly brought on by good living) was commonplace.  The poor, of course, would have mostly been thin.  And in Asia and several developing countries, being fat is automatically associated with wealth; the fatter, the richer, the better seems to be the motto, but as this may be classed as social eating rather than Gluttony as a vice in itself, maybe we can excuse it.

Nowadays the poor are often the fat ones, though whether this is really down to Gluttony or to ignorance and the plethora of cheap and nasty fatty foods promoted by the food industry is debatable.  Personally, I think that there is always a degree of personal choice involved, and after all these “fatties” did not become fat overnight, did they never look in the mirror and realize they were putting on a few pounds, were scales never around in their houses?  Or am I being too simplistic; luckily enough I have never been prone to putting on much weight, and I do walk every day and don’t own a car, so they might also be factors.

But I am amazed at the vast quantities people actually eat, sometimes when we are out in a restaurant one wonders just where they put it all, especially on help-yourself buffets, where some people just load up their plate with everything going.  And this is perhaps the real Gluttony, those who are not hungry or poor, but who eat out of love of food, for eating’s sake, as if food itself were a rarity, or might be taken away from them if they don’t put away everything in sight.  As a child one had to finish everything on one’s plate, but then our parents were sensible and didn’t spoil us or overfill our platters, also I was never given a whole chocolate bar, or a bag of sweets to eat on my own. “Share and share alike” we were taught, and so we learnt not to overindulge, not to spoil ourselves, not to succumb to Gluttony.

Actually I think the Gluttons needs our sympathy, they must be quite unhappy if they feel the desperate need to keep eating, there must be something else they are really lacking, most probably self-love and self-respect, and because they are inevitably overweight then that becomes another consoling reason to overeat.  But a little bit of self control wouldn’t go amiss, surely.

Friday 18th November

As a child it was always curtains; apart from maybe the very rich I don’t think anyone had blinds at all.  You certainly didn’t see them in the shops, not that you actually saw curtains either.  You saw curtain material, and sometimes poles and cords and such-like paraphernalia but ready-made curtains were unheard of.  If you couldn’t sew yourself you had to pay someone to run your curtains up for you, or get some secondhand.  In Cyprus we had Drapes, rather than curtains; huge rich velvet and satin drapes that hung ceiling to floor, and matching, material covered pelmets with little fringes on, and huge tie backs again either embroidered or be-tasselled.  In truth I don’t think that these had been changed or indeed cleaned in decades, they were certainly never drawn, even in the evenings.  All the windows in our official residence had internal shutters that would be clattered shut at sundown.  I remember this because I was reminded of it in the short promotional film for John Lennon’s Imagine; Adrian and I watched it together on a tiny black and white television in his squalid Hackney flat, and as Yoko went around the room opening up white shutter after white shutter and flooding the bare white room with light, I exclaimed that we too had shutters in Cyprus, though I don’t think ours were white or full length either – but the film had stirred a memory which might have otherwise remained buried forever.  Or is this one of those times you are not sure if you remember it happening, or rather remember the moment you first recalled the memory.

In Putney we had the very same curtains for the twenty years or so I lived there, I don’t think that either Grandma or my mother could sew, and somehow it never occurred to either of them to replace these almost antique curtains.  Once, in a fit of spring cleaning, or maybe shame, I climbed on a stepladder and unclipped the hooks, and lugged them down to the launderettes and paid for them to do a service wash, then with my mother’s help we re-hung them, and I even tacked up a couple of drooping hems.  They looked cleaner but somehow looked a bit pathetic against the yellowing paint and even older wallpaper.

Edward liked blinds, he said they were more modern and cleaner, well – they were cleaner if someone (guess who) bothered to wipe them; I actually thought they were dust traps, but still.  So, we had wooden blinds throughout the house, and yes, they are modern and they can be slanted to adjust the light quite nicely, but when they are raised they offer little in the way of privacy as people living opposite can see straight into ones’ rooms – at least with curtains one can half draw them and sit out of the direct line of vision.  And on those cold winter evenings there is nothing nicer than drawing heavy velvet curtains right across and shutting out the cold and the dark.

So, I think in the New Year I will pop in to Peter Jones and see what ready-mades they have in stock.  Maybe I will treat myself and put a bit more of my character into the old place.  So, excuse my joke, but it will be curtains for blinds from now on.

Thursday 17th November

I was walking in Green Park again today – and how different from just a few short weeks ago, the ground was now covered, layered and blanketed in leaves, leaves, leaves everywhere, and it was gorgeous.  Such rich reds and yellows and the palest of washed out greens and every possible shade of brown, and the trees were almost but not quite bare; and every so often as the wind combed through the branches a few leaves would be torn off and swirl, rise and fall and rise again and then drift slowly, dancing their way to earth.  And even here they weren’t still, little eddies kept swirling about, it was quite dry and though a lot of the leaves from earlier falls were damp and some in the pathways were all squished and mashed up, most were dry and rustled around like sand on a windy beach.

I bent down and picked up a few, some droopy chestnuts, a few squiggly oaks, a couple of simple planes and several large maples with their distinctive three large pointy lobes and two smaller side ones; I wrapped them in a few tissues and carried them home with me.

I laid them out on my glass-topped coffee table, and examined them closely.  Of course they were all so different, no two alike at all, though all basically the same design.  They all have a central stem, carrying the water from the roots and returning with the chemicals, basically sugar created by the chlorophyl’s interaction with sunlight.  Amazing technology, and far superior to anything dreamed up by man.  And all, well almost all, plants have leaves; they are one of the basic building blocks of nature, and we simply take them for granted.  Maybe they are more like living entities in themselves, working together like bees in a hive for the colony’s, the home tree’s benefit rather than just a small functioning part of the tree itself.  And like those bees, quite happy to surrender their life so that a new generation of leaves can appear, budding into life next spring.

I began to think about how many leaves there might be on a bush or a tree, was it thousands, or could it stretch to the tens of thousands, and then how many trees, shrubs and bushes there were in just a small area such as Green Park, and you soon reached numbers that made the recently announced seven billion humans seem very small indeed.  And each one is different, quite unique, though similar.  And this is the pattern throughout nature, multiple similar but slightly different structures creating a whole that is far greater than the sum of its parts.  And so on up the evolutionary scale, through the fishes and birds and insects and reptiles and mammals and eventually we get to humans, who are not so dissimilar from leaves; we are all unique, though far more similar than we might like to admit.  Though not yet so numerous, thank goodness.

Wednesday 16th November

In the mid 1990’s there was a TV sitcom called ‘Men Behaving Badly’.  It was a great success, and really very very funny.  It also caught a mood, which was being set by magazines like GQ and Loaded, where specifically ‘Lad’ behavior was celebrated, this was really nothing more nor less than old-fashioned bad behavior, but it was dressed up as being clever, post modern and very desirable.  Why should any of this matter you might say, and really I couldn’t care less.  There has always been a certain element in society which likes to behave badly, and luckily except for the occasional encounter late in the evening on the Tube, I don’t meet them very often.  My only gripe with this rise in ‘Lad’ culture was that it legitimized rudeness, in a similar way that ‘Top Gear’ on television has become a byword for boorishness and vulgarity; not that this stops it being watched by millions I might add.

However one of the maybe unseen consequences of men being allowed to behave badly was the rise of ‘Women Behaving Badly’.  As you know, I am no feminist; I quite like the differences between the sexes, and am more than ever convinced that, whereas some women can emulate men remarkably well, and of course the opposite aspect of really feminine men also exists, on the whole men are better at some things and women better at others.  And behaving badly is far better performed by men.

The usual precursor to ‘Behaving Badly’ by either sex is consuming vast quantities of alcohol.  Women are very poor drunks, not that men are good at being drunk, but because of their biology, they can generally drink far more than women can before they too fall over. At times I have drunk a bit too much myself, especially in Italy where the sunshine and lazy lifestyle and abundance of cheap wine and good food all conspire to encourage you to let your hair down.  Perhaps I am fortunate, but I always seem to see a red light going on somewhere in the back of my head, and slow down and start to drink water or juice instead; maybe it is just that I am that bit more reserved in the first place, so have further to fall – whatever the reason, though often a bit tiddley, I have never been drunk.

What I find so sad is the sight of women getting drunk on the street.  And the outrageous clothes they choose to wear, the ridiculous short skirts, the bra straps on show, the stupidly high stiletto’s and the ugliest thing of all – the waistline stringy T. of a thong showing between skirt and top.  I saw a documentary recently made by Stephen Fry about Aids, and he was outside a nightclub in Newcastle talking to the girls going in, most dressed as above and already quite under the influence of alcohol; the shocking thing was how many of the girls were just like the boys, “looking for a shag”, and then at the end of the evening, being sick in the street, clothing and hair a mess, and more than likely prey for some unscrupulous men.

Why, oh why girls do you have to behave like men.  It isn’t clever, it is just sad.  And it won’t make you popular or loved or happy at all. One day you will wake up at maybe thirty-something and agree with me, so why do you have to go through all of this degrading behaviour in the first place.  I know I am wasting my words on most of you, but I really feel they are worth saying anyway.

Tuesday 15th November

When I first started working in that little engineering firm, I remember clearing out an old filing cupboard, and coming across several sheets of lined foolscap covered in some strange markings, almost hieroglyphics, but more like squiggles and dashes.  At first I thought they might have been in Urdu or Arabic, but Wendy, a much older woman in the office, put me straight. “Oh, that is shorthand, that is.  I don’t think anyone here uses it anymore.”  Apparently there was a whole language, which secretaries used, to write as speedily as a letter was being dictated by their boss.  And then they would sit down at a typewriter and type up the letter, making sure to insert a sheet of carbon paper between two sheets, one flimsy, being the office copy, and a piece of stiffer letter-headed paper in front.  And the typewriter may well have been mechanical or an early electric one with some sort of automated paragraph stops and a return key, rather than sliding that big chrome lever all the way across the platen bar, often making a ringing sound.  I am suddenly reminded now of another favorite on childhood radio, “The Typewriter Symphony” which I used to love, but I digress.

For years typewriters were the norm, and armies of women became typists as a career.  In large organizations there would be whole rooms full of typists – ‘The Typing Pool’, and even quite small firms would often employ someone just to type up not only letters, but contracts, orders and invoices and receipts.  There were precious few photocopiers, and typists used to always have a bottle of tippex, or little leaves of correcting paper to overtype on mistakes.  If you made a mistake, there was no backspace and change facility, and no spellcheck either, you had to get it right first time, or go back and manually correct it, or worst of all, start over again.

Then, wonder of wonders the electronic word processor arrived, which had the simple facility of remembering the order of the keys typed, and so standardized letters could be remembered along with all the Tabs and spacings and paragraphs and bullet points, and better still amended before pressing print, and just like a mechanical piano off it went and typed, well – golf-balled most likely, a whole document on its’ own.

Pretty soon even this too became obsolete, as the PC with Word and cheap printers became pretty ubiquitous everywhere.  And now, we do not need those armies of typists, with all their specialist knowledge.  Everyone can type their own letters, and thanks to spellcheck no-one even needs to know how to spell, and judging by the hasty entries one sees on facebook all the time even cares how bad their spelling is.  Mobile phones now come with keyboards, or touch screen versions and there is even software available for disabled people to be able to type, just by using a pointer or looking at the screen keyboard and blinking.  And voice command technology is so good nowadays that you pretty soon will not even need a keyboard at all.  I wonder how long before we will be able to just think our letters and out the cursor on the screen will roll the words, all spelled correctly and with orthodox syntax and any font you want too.   Or maybe we will see the death of the printed word completely – all communication being straight from person to person with no interface at all – much like talking once was.