Monday 11th May

After all the excitement and disappointment of the election campaign I have had a couple of really quiet days here in Eymet.  My wife has returned to England for a few days and I have been running the café.  Saturday was really busy, one table after another almost all day – and then Sunday was dead, hardly a person in town and certainly none who wanted coffee and cake.  So it goes.  One table on Saturday were members of a make-shift choir and they told me they had been learning their singing parts for a performance that evening.  It was ‘Trial by Jury’ by Gilbert and Sullivan and held in the Espace Culturel, so I decided to go along.  As you might imagine Light Operettas have never been a staple part of my musical diet, but I have seen a few bits of G. & S. here and there, and most importantly this one is only forty minutes long.

It was actually rather fun, sung in English by English to an English audience in South West France; just what the few French in the audience must have made of it I don’t know.  Quite a clever little light-hearted story, I particularly like the intricate rhyming of the lyrics.  Watched a bit of TV and early to bed.  Tonight I will be doing some washing in the Laverie.  Once near Le Touquet I saw a huge Bugs Bunny above a launderette with the brilliant name of Tex Laverie, but ours is just called Fil et Folie.

The sun is shining and I will be shutting the shop up early and sit in the sun for a while…..Wish you were all here, but just as well you aren’t.

Sunday 10th May

Here is our old friend Janek, remember him.  I am looking back fondly at the year 2066.  This was how it all started; Janek secretly recording his thoughts, committing them to a secret device – poor deluded fool…..

Diary Entry – 20660110

“I have been ultra-careful these last few days.  I have had to be.  I feel that in this ridiculously dangerous enterprise I have embarked upon I cannot actually be too careful.  Am I just paranoid or have I been getting funny looks from people at work?  Maybe it’s just my imagination working overtime, but as it is more than likely that I will be caught at some point, I am almost looking out for it.  Is that what this is all about then, am I just seeking a way out?  Is this whole exercise my escape tunnel from a life I feel more and more imprisoned by?  Am I just waiting for the knock on the door, the i-com asking me to come to hum-res.  Or just as possible, to be quietly sidelined and by degrees and with no explanation at all be down-strata-ed until I join the ranks of the lowly drones, where I am less than nothing in their eyes.  So, problem solved.

Or am I just getting away with it, could it be that no-one is watching me at all, that actually no-one is interested in Janek Smith at all?  That would almost be as sad an outcome in a funny sort of way.  To be ignored, to be of no concern to anyone, is almost worse than to be recognised as some sort of threat.  Anyway, paranoid or not, I am still keeping an extremely low profile, keeping my head well beneath the radar.  (Does anyone use radar nowadays?  Wasn’t that just invented to spot Nazi planes, or did it have other uses? – I’ll have to remember to ask a screen about that.)

Although it is remarkably hard to just act naturally, to pretend that I am the same as I was a few days ago, that I wasn’t writing this secret and subversive little diary.  The more you try to act naturally the more you are aware what an act it is.  Not that I am revealing any great state secret I can assure you, I am only writing down what is common knowledge, what is everywhere, even on Disnews.  If you care to read between the lines, that is.  Nothing is what it seems on the surface, but dig a little deeper and you can see a different picture, a hidden image if you like, a meaning beneath the meaning.  One that most people prefer not to see, of course – it could affect their strata level.

One of my long-held suspicions is that History itself is being manipulated along with everything else. Why shouldn’t it be? What is to stop the news of a few years ago changing as our today’s perception changes?  The great leap forward was when they managed to get everyone to store everything in the ‘ether’ and not on their own devices.  No machine anywhere has any internal memory now, nothing stays on its original device, it is all uploaded automatically, and just as easily it can be read and changed if necessary.

How can we possibly remember or ever be certain that our own memory is more reliable than the official version.  A few times now I have recalled an old com I made, sometimes only a few weeks old, and I don’t quite recognise it.  Something might have subtly changed, and I find myself asking the question, did I really write this?  Or has it been changed, tampered with, re-written in some way?  And I am never quite certain.  The more uncertain I become the more I doubt, both what I am re-reading and what I actually recall of having written in the first place.  Confusing?  You bet it is.  Easier not to even think about it, which is I am sure what they would prefer.

Of course, everyone trusts computers absolutely, far more than they trust their own fallible memories; and actually why bother remembering anything now – computers can do that for us far better than we can ourselves.  In the crammers they only teach you how to access information, not how to remember it.  All exams now are about the best way to collect, combine and précis information rather than finding out what you actually know.  No-one reads anything on paper at all nowadays, except a few antique novels published before the twenty-first century, but they are fast disappearing too.  No-one fills their fairly limited living space with those old objects anymore.  If you want to read something or hear some music you only have to think the thought and before you have finished mouthing the words it is available, but just as quickly it is gone.  Everything just is, everything is of the moment, but nothing is permanent.  Nothing remains, all is transient.

And no-one questions this.  If I want to hear an old recording say of ‘The Stones’ or some other classical music, I can hear it whenever and wherever I want.   I just have to silently whisper the words and there it is in my ears.  Unbelievably, people used to buy music a hundred years ago on black plastic plates.  Huge heavy things, I’ve seen them in museums.  And they needed a special machine to listen to them.  But it was a mechanical reproduction, it couldn’t be externally manipulated, presumably it always sounded the same.  Now when I want to hear something I think I know I simply ask and it plays for me.  But how can I tell it is exactly the same as the last time I asked for it?  Could the words have been altered, the tempo slowed down, the sound subtly enhanced?  It would be so easy to do, and how would we know.  We trust what we see and hear, but cannot even remember if it is the same as last time.  We have forgotten how to remember anything because we don’t need to.

I just used the example of a piece of music, but it could be anything at all, especially the news or our recent history.  Who is to say it isn’t being constantly revised, amended, subtly altered as circumstances change.

We have access to everything and yet possess nothing.  The whole idea of possessions is disappearing fast, people’s living spaces are simply too small, and besides it is easier to just access than to own.  I was reading that people used to own everything, autos, houses, furniture and clothes, and only a few years ago now.  It would be inconceivable and so economically unsustainable to own an auto today; everyone just rents one when you need them, and you have automatic upgrades every year.  The auto is never yours, but is available to you as long as you maintain your strata level.   New autos too, they all seem shiny and new, but I wonder what happens to all the old models.  Are they tidied up, vac-sealed and sold to the Far East where they no longer make such things, or are they scrapped and re-cycled, or are they maybe just slightly rebranded and sold back to us as upgrades?  And it is the same with clothes; you just go to the Apparel store, take your old stuff back and for a small cred adjustment get new things.   People would be amazed to realise that our grandparents actually bought new clothes all the time, and only threw them away when they were wearing out, or if the whim took them to dispose of whole wardrobes full of stuff.  We don’t even need wardrobes now because it is easier to just trade up your clothes than keep them for years and years.

This is because the whole nature of cred, or money as it used to be called, has changed.  Money used to have a steady sort of value, give or take a bit of inflation, which we have managed to get rid of too, thank goodness.  Our predecessors would be amazed at the very concept of our “cred”.  “Cred” isn’t actual money; there are no notes or coins; it is simply the amount you have available at any time to spend.  Like everything else you don’t own it, you never actually see it.  Every month it accrues to you, depending on your strata level, and you have a degree of choice in how to spend it, but you never get anything like a reckoning, a statement they used to call it I believe.  You can’t overspend because you aren’t allowed to.  The very concept of personal debt has been eliminated, as has any responsibility over your own finances.  Cred just is.  Every month you have some, in fact it is seamlessly topped up.  Like some magic wine glass, no matter how much you drink the glass is never quite empty, you just cannot see who is filling it up.

No-one really thinks about their “cred”, they assume that some exterior-accounting is going on somewhere in some hypercom and what is left, your “cred”, is yours to spend on food or whatever.  You see something you would like to use, maybe on a screen-ad, and you know that you wouldn’t be able to see it at all if you couldn’t actually afford it.  If you didn’t have enough cred it wouldn’t be beamed onto your screen in the first place.  We are like children in some magic Alladin’s cave, only each of us, or each strata level anyway is in a slightly different cave, seeing different degrees of treasure.   Simple really, and perfect thought out too.  No debt, no money worries, no misery.

Except that if you stop to think about it, what does any of it matter?  Nothing has any real value; there is no substance to anything.  It can all be taken away as easily as it is given.  We have lost all control of our destiny.  Our whole lives are being controlled by the whim of some Hypercom.  Everything we think we may have achieved is an illusion.  Every day you wake up and your whole world is only there for as long as it pleases them to allow it to continue.   It would all stop tomorrow, this instance even, if this diary – if these most private thoughts were discovered.  I am committing one of the cardinal sins.  I have started to live in my own world and not theirs.  And it suddenly occurs to me, am I a reb after all?  Is that what I have become, simply by this process of writing something down that they don’t know about?  Maybe this is how it always starts.  The realisation that there may be another world somewhere else, even inside your own mind, one that they do not control.  I hadn’t fully understood that at all until now.”

Saturday 9th May

Enoch Powell once said that every political career ends in failure.  True, but hardly could we have expected it in such a fashion.  Douglas Alexander, Jim Murphy and Ed Balls for Labour; Vince Cable, Danny Alexander and saddest of all Charles Kennedy and so many others for the Lib-Dems and (small comfort) Esther McVey for the Tories to mention but a few who lost their seats in a remarkable night of carnage.  Nigel Farage, Nick Clegg and Ed Milliband are all resigning as leaders of their parties.  Rarely has there been such a sad night for everyone except the Conservatives.  And yet, and yet.  There was hardly a roar of approval for the Tories either, many people voted out of fear; of the SNP, of immigrants and of financial uncertainty.  This does not feel anything like the sea-changes we saw with Thatcher and Blair.  All along it has been the case that Milliband was far less popular than his party and Cameron was far more liked than his.

And in the end maybe personality won and people judged that sticking with Dave was a safer bet than the risk of chaos with Labour and some sort of support from the SNP.

So what happens now?  Another suitcase in another hall….or three maybe.  I have no idea who will be the new leader of UKIP and feel it will make little difference as the party was so identified with likeable rogue Nigel.  The Lib-Dems will take years to rebuild the house that Charlie built, for we should never forget that he was the one who brought them to their best ever haul of 65 M.P.s in 2005.  Clegg has masterminded the spectacular demise of the Lib-Dems, hungry for power and ministerial positions he grasped the chance to be in the coalition despite the obvious anti-Tory sentiments of those who voted for him.  He remains un-forgiven by the electorate and maybe by his party too,

Ed Milliband, well what can you say.  Mistakes such as making Ed Balls his shadow chancellor and taking Scotland for granted and also, cruel I know, for not being photogenic enough and also for having a pretty uninspiring manifesto.  Too safe by far and no real reason to vote for them.  Cameron too ran an uninspired campaign but was the lesser of two evils; one feels it won’t be long before Boris takes over.  Rarely has one night resulted in so many political casualties.

Friday 8th May

As you wake up (I have been up all night) this morning you will find a Conservative Government, maybe even a majority.  And it is all because of the Lib-Dems.  Their vote has absolutely collapsed, and most of it has gone to the Tories.  Well, of course we don’t know that for sure.  There may well have been a lot of churn.  Many Lib-Dems may have gone to Labour, or to UKIP but have been outweighed by Labour losing even more votes to UKIP or indeed directly to the Tories.  Whatever.  Labour have been wiped out in Scotland, replaced by the SNP.  The Lib-Dems slaughtered in the South and South-West and mostly to the benefit of the Tories.

So, what happened?  Actually overall the Labour vote and vote share looks to have increased slightly and the Tories vote gone down.  What I have seen over many many elections is an even greater polarisation in the country.  The Tories rule supreme in the South of the country, except for Inner London.  Labour (or the even more left wing SNP) are holding the North.  What this means long-term for the unity of the country is anyone’s guess.  The other factor is the rise of UKIP, and although they do not appear to have won many seats they are now actually in second place in quite a few seats.  I am not completely surprised, but disappointed.  It has actually been a long time since we had a single term Government (Edward Heath 1970- 1974 actually) and the public tends to give the Government the benefit of the doubt at least for one election.  I am fairly certain now that Ed will resign.  It will take a very competent Labour leader to win next time.  I am not sure who that might be.  Or we may find that people tire of permanent Austerity, maybe the economy will flag again, the long-promised referendum on Europe could be a disaster.  Whoever said politics was boring….

Thursday 7th May

I have a friend, who shall remain nameless though not blameless, who doesn’t vote. “They are all the same”, “It won’t make any difference who you vote for.”  Etc, etc, etc.  And while it is true that neither of the large parties will radically alter the status quo, or seriously challenge big business or start a revolution it still does matter who you vote for, or actually that you do vote at all.  Because the worst result of all, far worse than UKIP getting a few M.P.s or the dreaded SNP having a say on what goes on at Westminster will be if there is a low turnout.  One of the arguments bubbling under and sure to come to the surface soon is the question of legitimacy.  Will it be legitimate for a party which comes in second to put together either a formal coalition or an informal arrangement with other smaller parties to form a government when the one which gets the most votes or seats is unable to do so.  Well, as far as legitimancy goes I am sure it would be, though it will be sure to upset a whole other bunch of people who voted a different way.  But five years ago Labour supporters were horrified that the LibDems, who everyone considered to be slightly to the left of Labour, jumped so quickly into bed with the right-wing Tories.

Under our first past the post, winner takes all system there are always going to be a lot of people upset.  In fact it is almost always the case that less than half the people vote for the winning party, or, as may be the case, are happy with the choice of coalition partners.  We are facing the prospect that whoever ‘wins’ and becomes Prime Minister may have been voted for by around only a third of those voting.  But it gets worse; as there may only be 60% of the registered voters who actually go out and vote that 35% is only 22.75% of the actual people registered to vote.  And as not all over eighteens actually bother to register to vote anyway and maybe as many as ten percent do not do so the percentage of adults in the country who have actually voted for the winning party could be few as one in five.

And what right have any of us to complain at whoever forms the next government if we haven’t actually bothered to take part in electing them?  So, whoever you do or do not support, please go and vote.

Wednesday 6th May

I love snooker, especially the World Championships held in Sheffield.  It always culminates on this recent Monday Bank Holiday, usually quite late at night too.  The thing about snooker is that while most of the players are technically brilliant one of the things which separates them is personality.  And while one doesn’t really know you get a pretty good idea from these long matches, the final is the best of 35 frames and takes two long days.  I usually want Ronnie O’Sullivan to win, but this year he was a bit below par and got beaten by Stuart Bingham.  In the other half of the draw Sean Murphy was sailing through his matches and looked pretty unstoppable.  The other star of this year was Judd trump, who while a brilliantly talented player has flashes of recklessness which make his matches intriguing.  So, after Ronnie went out I thought that Judd would be in the final, and several commentators were backing this to be his year.  But Stuart Bingham slowly ground him down and spectacularly won the semi-final.  The final now looked a shoo-in for Sean Murphy.  But exactly who was Stuart Bingham, a 50 to one outsider, though he was ranked number ten.  He had won a few tournaments and had been around for twenty years and was now thirty-eight, surely too old to win.  He is by all accounts one of the genuinely nice guys in the game, liked by all.  Too nice surely to win this slog-fest.

He did win and he never lost his composure at all.  He was gracious and seemed genuinely surprised at his win; the BBC team concluded that sometimes the nice guy does win.

Let us hope it is an augury for Ed Milliband, who despite the Tory lie that he stabbed his brother in the back (actually he simply stood for leader in a contest his brother also stood in – one wonders if they would have been saying the same thing about David had he won) is a nice guy who genuinely believes he has the best ideas for running the country.  Watching Tory Party Political Broadcasts and the right-wing press one would think he was the nastiest man in England.  He is the underdog, just as Stuart Bingham was.  He has stayed the course and has performed very well, he has won over a lot of skeptics who thought he would fold under Tory pressure, and with two days to go he is neck and neck with the favourite. You never know, the nice guy might actually win.

Tuesday 5th May

Well, the election looks too close to call.  And already there are claims of ‘no legitimacy’ from the Tories if Labour are ‘propped up’ by the SNP.  But I contend that there is a question of legitimacy for whichever party or combination of parties makes it over the line on May 8^th.  Blair holds the dubious record of lowest share of the vote when he won on 36% (but still a big majority) and even Maggie only got 42% a couple of times; the days of 50% were back in the fifties.  It is quite possible with UKIP now in the mix for some M.P.s to be elected with just over 20% of the vote – which whoever gets in is hardly democracy.  But all the various Proportional Representation systems are both far too complicated and tend to promote people’s second choices.  And why in any case should we be forced to have a second choice when we want our first choice to win.  So, how do still retain a geographical link with our MP and give all those other (losing) voters a say in who gets elected.

The answer is my solution – Super Constituencies.  Ten times the size of our present ones and in as geographically similar area as possible but electing ten Members of Parliament each.  Each party or independents would have a list of ten possible candidates but voters could vote for only one, either a party or an individual if standing as an Independent.  Ten percent of the vote gets you an M.P. Parties would have to list their potential M.P.s in order beforehand and each ten percent would see one elected.  So, in a Superconstituency which reflected the polls we might expect 3 (or 4) Labour, 3 (or 4) Tory and one LibDem, one UKIP and maybe a Green M.P.  Almost every voter would see their vote count and have an M.P. who represented their views.  The House of Commons would undoubtedly more accurately reflect the political views of the electorate.

Of course it would mean almost permanent Coalitions, but as this would be a given there would be an end to the present farce of the big two parties refusing to even contemplate not winning a majority.  Hopefully parties would start presenting policies which other parties could agree to, and stop declaring that they and only they can save the NHS etc:   Even I, a lifelong Labour supporter, do agree slightly with some of the Tory ideas, though I will never vote for them.  Most of us live in Constituencies where the M.P. (or the party they come from) never changes, so many many voters never get an M.P. of their choice and never will.  If nothing else this election proves that ‘first past the post’ itself has no legitimacy.

Monday 4th May

I flew back yesterday, Sunday.  A bit of a bumpy ride as it happened; a thunderstorm over Stansted which we circled for about half an hour being occasionally buffeted around.  Got home to London about seven and cooked a pizza.  Settled down to watch the snooker and fell asleep on the sofa, woke up and it was over – never mind.

Flicking through the channels I caught an Alan Yentob special on BBC4 about Rod Stewart. It brought back fond memories.  I saw the Faces twice, once at Weeley in 1972 and a year later at the Valley, the old ground of Charlton Athletic.  Both times they were superb.  They were one of my favourite bands of the early seventies.  Rod had joined the Faces in 1970 after the Jeff Beck Group broke up, but he had also just signed a record deal with Regal Xylophone for four or five solo albums.  Seemingly unfazed by this contradiction Rod and the band simply recorded one record as the Faces and the next as Rod Stewart.  But suddenly even though the Faces were doing very well, the first B side single of Rod’s third album “Every Picture Tells A Story” was played extensively on American Radio and ‘Maggie May’ became number one on both sides of the Atlantic.  The Faces soon disintegrated and Rod sailed on alone.  The hits kept coming and even “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy” couldn’t dent his popularity.  Rod is one of those artists, like Elton and McCartney that you have to admire for simply lasting so long when so many others have fallen by the wayside.

The programme was followed by Rod at the BBC, mostly out-takes from Top of the Pops.  It brought back some great memories and you have to admit he had some great hairstyles too.

Sunday 3rd May

-[And so as I watch him again Janek hides away his secret antique laptop and pretends he just couldn’t sleep, he waves the kitchen screen awake, but is he suspecting that it has never been asleep at all; ‘just because the screen is blank it doesn’t mean it isn’t thinking, does it.’ as he might well have put it himself.   The screen defaults to Disnews in one quarter, with a lovely sun rise over a spinney wet with dew filling the screen as gentle orchestral music slowly plays in the background.

Almost before Janek mouths the words, the news channel is opened up for him, or rather the twelve different news items, and whichever one he glances at he hears the reportage for that story, the hidden cams in the screen tracking his own eye movements; if he rests for more than three seconds on any story it expands to fill almost the whole screen while the others seem to hover in bars along the bottom of the screen.  He is watching a story about disappearing species, such as the zebra and the giraffe, once so populous throughout Africa, and now down to a few hundred individuals.  Even zoo’s cannot now cope with keeping extinct species going, reverting to cataloguing their DNA and keeping sperm and egg banks rather than live specimens.  The plan is that when conditions improve re-seeding can take place.

Janek thinks back to his childhood, but it is hard to differentiate between what he saw in vid-docs and what may have been before his eyes.  He seems to remember elephants and hippos and rhinos all muddy grey and wrinkled and gazing at him from another age completely.   They appear to be totally bewildered staring out of their concrete boxes, specimens from a former era, swaying from side to side in their silent despairing panic.  There are still a few of these left scattered around the few bubbled NatureWorlds but nobody cares about the tapirs and the wildebeests and all the various antelopes anymore, they have less tourist attraction, and besides there aren’t parks big enough for all the disappearing species.  But the news item seems to be suggesting that this mass cull of species has always been happening, it is all a part of evolution somehow.  Throughout the ages there have been both catastrophic and slow wipe-outs of whole families of creatures; evolutionary excursions that came to dead-ends.  And something else always comes to fill the void.  Evolution is a continuing process; those extinctions have rarely been man’s fault.  And they are right, evolution is what we are all involved in, like it or not.  The planet and all its varied populations are constantly evolving and we, humans and machines alike, are all part of it, even sceptical Janek is gradually changing along with everyone else.

Bored by the news, by the almost absurd pleasure in the voiceovers; disaster upon disaster seem to be relished by the news reporters, he blinks the screen closed.  It seems to him that the worse it is, somehow the more they enjoy reporting on it.  But in fact it doesn’t matter how awful the news, humans just absorb it along with the screen-ads.  Nothing seems to register.  News has almost become a vicarious pleasure in itself, another spectator sport for the masses.  We cannot simply blame Disnews and the Americans for that either.  People seem to be removing themselves further and further away from the real world, from things outside their own little Universe.  The more information there is available, the less they seem interested. With all this technology at our fingertips we struggle to communicate, we cannot seem to make people take it all seriously, let alone take it in.   Another potential problem we know we will have to address.

Strangely, as the situation has deteriorated, less and less people show any surprise; they are far more concerned with their own strata level and personal lives than what may or may not be happening outside the tiny sphere they daily inhabit.  This may of course end up being an advantage in some ways; the solutions may not be so simple, and will certainly upset many.  Change always has to be managed carefully.  Sometimes maintaining the illusion of continuity is more important than exposing people to the harsh reality of change itself.  Plus ca change, plus l’illusion de la meme.

And even Janek may be wondering to himself why he bothers; a part of him has always suspected that the news, just like every other aspect of life today, is manipulated.  Nobody travels much outside of Northern Europe nowadays so the world outside what we know from our own experience could exist or maybe it doesn’t.  Nobody travels because almost every continental superstate has realised that the only way to control illegal migration is to seal up your borders.  Far too many scags kept trying to infiltrate by using visitor status, it was easier to just stop people moving around.   And by and large it has been successful; migration is now confined largely to within continents not between them.

Janek has long suspected that all you ever really know is limited by your own personal experience.   And the strata system is clever too, you are just as scared of falling down a strata or two as you are eager to be lifted up.  So people don’t rock the boat; besides even Janek must be wondering if there is really any boat to rock any more.  I mean what can you really do, how can you protest these days, and who would you protest to?   As I watch in backtrack Janek scans the History channels and watches century old images of long-haired youngsters throwing flares and rocks at the ranks of Polis, something they would never imagine doing now of course. I can read the amazement in his eyes as he wonders how the authorities ever let it happen.   He is right; it would certainly not be tolerated today.

But he hasn’t yet understood that those longhairs, those potential rebs, never changed a thing by protesting, it wasn’t the clamour for change from below that brought about progress but the realisation from above that they had to be more effective in controlling the financial system.  In fact it needed a complete rethink, especially after the third crash in 2029, when markets all around the world crashed within thirty minutes, all money, all property, in fact everything really, suddenly became worthless and no-one had any idea how to repair the system.  We had run out of fixes, there was no more money to lend to shore up the crumbling edifice and a fundamental re-structuring was required.

Co-incidentally of course, many newer companies were being practically run by super-computers by then. They made far fewer errors.  Humans were only really needed if the company wanted to absorb other companies or merge or make big global changes, and then the humans often made the wrong call anyway.  The most successful companies were those that relied on organic growth, not on borrowing vast sums for expansion (like a balloon, too rapid expansion always ends in a bang of some sort).  As the market system had so spectacularly failed it was decided, by whom it was never really acknowledged, that all companies should be run and actually governed by Hypercom-computers that would be linked into Gov, so that rather than waste energy competing for market dominance, they would be allotted spheres of influence uncontaminated by others.  We think it must have been the Chinese who first made it work, but they have always been secretive and we could never successfully hack their Gov files.  Let us then say then that the same solution was arrived at simultaneously all over the world.    It works like this.

All profit over a certain agreed percentage accrues back to Gov who, again at the behest of Hypercoms spend it where it is needed, on crammers and supplementing the private health system, which is fine for most procedures but cannot cope with old people or long-term illness.  These are covered by Gov cred, until the decision is taken to euthenase completely.   This is where the old nhs still has a function. It has become the last resort for the desperately ill; a residual sink for the broken and decrepit until they are deemed no longer economically viable at all, when the cost of their care exceeds there potential worth as consumers.  Most beg for euthen-heaven anyway, so the system never gets too clogged up.  The important thing is to keep the number of consumers constant, and constantly consuming too.

One of the great innovations is that nobody pays (or attempts to avoid) tax any more, there is no need.  Each individual’s cred is governed by their strata level which in turn is controlled by the profitability of the con-gloms, with the largest portion of all profit automatically accruing to Gov.  If there is ever a potential shortfall in revenue then cred levels are adjusted to bring everything back into line.  At first there were a few problems synchronising and aligning systems to work together, but now it all runs like clockwork.  More or less.  But an incredible complicated clock if you will; one which needs constant winding and minute adjustments.  The only need for Politicos is to decide how to spend the roughly 3% of the revenue which is left after all the necessary costs have been met.

Almost all the big expenditures are supervised by Hypercoms; which ensure there is ‘monitoring and efficiency at all levels’.  This is achieved by eliminating any human input of course.  Cutting out the inefficient human middle man was the best wheeze of all; people are still technically employed, but they only manage the decisions taken by the Hypercoms, and those decisions are closely monitored to make sure that they are managed well.  The great thing about a computer is that once the parameters have been set and the priorities decided, you only have to tell the machine once.  Unlike people of course.

We still like to retain the illusion that humans are important, but actually everything could work fine without them.  Probably better.   Except that what is it all for if not for the benefit of those very humans?  We must never forget that everything we have achieved is for the greater good of mankind.  We have finally turned a corner in our relationship with the computer.  It is now not only the slave of mankind but its helper, its improver, its friend almost.   Humans have achieved closer and closer links with the Hypercoms, and it could be said that just as we cannot exist without them, they too would have no meaning without our existence either.  They exist to improve our lives, and we are as needed by them, just as they need us.  We have obviously had difficulties in getting to this stage, there were many arguments and not a few failures, but actually it is all remarkably simple really; every problem is just an opportunity for improvement.  Hypercoms thrive on self-improvement.    One of the most popular mantras of Hypercom wisdom is “As things get more complicated in many ways the simpler they become.”]-

Saturday 2nd May

Hardly a week passes here in Eymet without some special celebration.  And the first of May is no exception.  Not only is it a bank holiday, held incidentally on whichever day it occurs rather than the following Monday as in Britain, it is also at least here in SouthWest France ‘Garlic Omelet Day”.   Another tradition is to give lily of the valley to ladies today.  There was a special lunch in the Salle PolyValente up near the old railway station.  It cost 11 euros and another 2.50 for a carafe of wine or Sangria.  A delicious lunch of the famous Garlic Omelette, though made with the green stalks of this year’s fresh garlic, with some cheese and a tomato filled with tuna mayonnaise (well you couldn’t imagine a French meal without meat or fish of some sort) and an apple flan Normande for dessert.

We met a few friends and for an hour or so had a lovely time.  There were mostly French people but as is the custom we were seated on long trestle tables and we knew quite a lot of the people there.  The ladies were all given a sprig if Lily of the Valley and the food was prepared by the ladies of the town.  All very organized; you paid at the door and received a ticket with formula or dessert and when you were ready you took it up to the table in front of the kitchen.  You then sat down and in a few minutes your lunch arrived.  Lovely.

Then in the evening it was our weekly music night at Le Pub Gambetta.  So, even though it has been quite wet, another lovely day.