Iris the Self-Confessed Luddite

Delving into the depths of my memory, I recently remembered a rather remarkable story I heard last year.

I was talking to a woman (let’s call her Iris) whom I barely knew, who happened to casually reveal that she’d once met Tim Berners-Lee at a dinner party.

As you do.

Their meeting was prior to the creation of the World Wide Web, but it so happened that he was developing his philanthropic idea at the time and decided to share his innovation with her.

Presumably Berners-Lee had come to expect a variety of positive reactions upon sharing his grand vision. Iris must have been a breath of fresh air, or perhaps a bitter pill to swallow, depending on your point of view.

“But how are you going to police it?”

That was her response. No praise. No wonder. Purely pragmatic. And indeed, rather admirable.

According to Iris, he replied that she needn’t worry. She persisted, eventually eliciting the reply that people would police it themselves.

“And you really think that’s going to work?”

This was both her thought at the time and mine as she recounted her tale. If people were able to police themselves, I thought, the world would likely be a very different place.

Our exchange was cemented in my thoughts as one of life’s more bemusing moments. It became no less confounding when just four days later, Berners-Lee marked the thirtieth anniversary of the World Wide Web by speaking to various journalists about ‘what went wrong’.

He and I share the belief he professed that day that ‘we can get the web we want’, but I’m digressing from the point of this piece.

Whilst I have various thoughts about our corruption of what Berners-Lee no doubt intended to be a wondrous gift, I am in this instance far more intrigued by Iris’ story as an exquisite illustration of the extraordinary ordinary.

Storytelling is well-documented as a pursuit that is at the heart of who we are as a species. Like many others, I’ve long been fascinated by the notion that we all have our own story to tell.

More often that not, these neat narratives we construct and recite to ourselves, along with the abridged version we divulge to others, are in fact a chaotic bundle of discrete tales we’ve accrued over the course of a lifetime. Case in point, Iris’ story has now become a part of mine. In reading this, mine may well become a part of yours.

This infinite game of Chinese Whispers naturally leads to inherent inconsistencies in the yarns we spin. It’s something I find to be rather enchanting, on the proviso it’s not being done to deliberately mislead the listener.

I often wonder if those I’m in awe of as having the ‘gift of the gab’ are simply good at verbal storytelling because they have an innate sense of which inconsistencies are anecdote-worthy, or whether it’s something that can be mastered with practise. After 23 years (ish) of observation, I’m starting to think it’s the former.

The fact that inspiration can smite at any time only increases my love for our narrative spiel, although slightly unhelpfully the inspiration for this little meander arrived in the small hours of Wednesday morning. Less than ideal for a borderline insomniac, but welcome nonetheless. As my friends’ Studio Space podcast reminded me, every creative process is different and even if mine seems to ever so slightly enjoy torturing me, I’m grateful to have any vague sense of ingenuity at all.

Taking a moment to ponder the staggering capability of our brains and our imagination should be effected more often. The Germans have a delicious word for the human mind’s tendency to vividly bring stories to life; ‘Kopfkino’, literally translating as ‘head cinema’.

I’m not entirely sure of how ‘Kopfkino’ is used in context, but I imagine it’s comparable to that fun yet futile activity of scripting how you think an entire conversation or confrontation will go. Despite being aware that the person we’re ‘talking to’ is but a figment of our fancy, we never fail to be surprised that these meticulously envisioned chats rarely go as planned.

Daydreaming, or nightdreaming depending on the hour, may predestine disappointment, but I doubt that will ever detract from its all too sweet temptation. After all, we wouldn’t devote so much of our lives to establishing our stories if not for our appetency for a beginning, middle and end.

Impermanent Embers

I caught a glimpse of something glowing in the ochre dawn. The air felt fresh, mingled with a ligneous scent I couldn’t quite put my finger on.

That was when I knew.

I’ve always appreciated the curious beauty of the natural world. This is likely thanks to my parents instilling such a proclivity in me since I was first old enough to be popped into a snowsuit.

Yet, it’s only in the past two years or so that I’ve truly begun to take note of the irredeemable charm of the changing seasons. I suspect it’s the freedom from my cyclical schooling calendar that means I’ve finally been able to escape a world almost entirely consisting of other’s original thoughts and my not-so-original thoughts.

That being said, the lure of autumn has always been irresistible to me.

Just outside my window is one of the finest examples of the season’s cinnamon magic. My neighbours nurture the most glorious tree, species regretfully unknown, and every September it’s utterly transformed. Leaves once shimmering green become little pieces of luxurious, crimson velvet, putting on a display to rival the entrance hall of the Ritz.

It’s evanescent. It’s tantalizing. It’s nature’s assortment of marzipan fruits.

And it sets my little world on fire.

Everywhere I go, I marvel at the view before me, feeling that familiar flip of my stomach I normally reserve for moments of intense nervousness. It’s as though I’m about to make a speech, only to be relieved to discover that it’s merely the trees who are there to listen.

It might sound strange, but it’s true. To me nothing tastes sweeter. I quietly go about my life for two (three?) whole delicious months like an ecstatic child who’s just been treated to a biscuit. There’s simply nothing I find more pleasing than being swaddled in a scarf, face burning as I turn my key in the lock and closing the door on the crunchy earth behind me.

The greatest part is knowing that each foliole will remain there until there tomorrow, consumed as they are by an intoxicating combination of aestheticism and hedonism. I like to suppose that the mysterious ways of the world wish to remind us there is perhaps a great deal to be said for creating art for art’s sake.

A majority of people seem to regard autumn as our year’s last hurrah, but I don’t think that’s true. It feels more like the start of something. After all, this is the time when gardeners will tell you that if you plan to seek signs of life in February, now is when seeds must be sown.

Whilst the season is perhaps our most ephemeral, I’m never left feeling disconsolate by its passing. Autumn’s fugacious quality speaks to me to simply say this; live life passionately. Be bold. Squeeze every last drop of blazing colour from every single moment. Savour this memory for the rest of your days.

I will. I promise.

Woe is Wanderlust

Last weekend, I am unashamed to say I spent much of my time binge-watching Emily in Paris, like most of the rest of the UK according to Netflix.

It was everything I look for in an easy-watch and I gleefully allowed one episode to melt into another, not unlike a vast camembert, to add my own shameless cliché to this delightful narrative.

I was absolutely enraptured, in the same way I was when I mindfully decided to watch Midnight in Paris a couple of weeks ago. A comparable thing happened too when I first discovered the ‘French Chill’ playlist on Spotify thanks to The High Low.

And yet, when I actually visited Paris, I don’t recall feeling enthralled at all.

Of course, I’m aware that the two American productions I’ve mentioned are portraying the city and France as a whole in an idyllic, interpreted, screen-friendly way. I also admit that I visited in January, on a university-organised holiday that was more or less everything you can imagine about such an excursion.

In short, we were ‘classic tourists’.

As such, I know that I didn’t have the opportunity to appreciate the immense history and culture of Paris in a manner befitting such a place.

It’s trips like these, amongst others, that remind me why I love going to places with no agenda, wandering seldom trodden paths to wherever they may take me. If I happen to come across something notable, wonderful. If I don’t, perfect.

I relish feeling the fabric of a place, just as much as I adore easing myself into my favourite jumpers, of which, incidentally, there are many.

It’s a sentiment that’s prompted my desire to explore more of the world alone, although Coronavirus aside, I’m not sure when that will be happening. I’ve only recently mustered the courage to visit local cafés unaccompanied and even then, it’s always with a book or laptop in hand.

That travel has become a major industry is no secret. However, it wasn’t until I saw an advert for Michael Palin’s new BBC Two documentary, Michael Palin: Travels of a Lifetime, that I had ever really stopped to truly take stock of how vast it now is.

In it, he simply shared that when he began creating his documentaries for television, he never imagined that society, or rather a specific sector of it, would be gripped by such an impulse to travel.

Bear in mind that this was only 30 years ago. Today, hodophiles seem to be lurking around every corner, whether you’re at brunch, on a dating app (don’t get me started), at the office, or, most bizarrely of all, when you’re actually already on holiday.

I’m taking a rather didactic tone for someone who’s entirely complicit in this. Perhaps it is simply that we all have hodophilic tendencies within us and now it’s simply possible for more of us to respond to the call of the wild.

None of this is to say that I don’t appreciate meaningful conversations about travel either. Finding out more about why someone chose to go to a certain place, what they discovered whilst they were there and how much it meant to them is something I’m as intrigued by as the next person.

But more often than not, we seem to just give statements of where we’ve been. It’s as though all we care about is ticking boxes. The further away the box, the worthier it is.

This is probably why I’m perpetually bothered by how many people are surprised by my love of a, for want of a less cringeworthy word, ‘staycation’. Travel now seems to carry such cultural currency that admitting this is almost the same as donning a neon sign bearing the word ‘boring’.

My family and I have never been abroad together and this shocks people. My Mum, nor my grandparents, have a passport and I’m relatively certain the emergency paperwork my Dad once rushed to Swansea to get for an impromptu work event has expired.

We have no desire to go abroad either. Of course, there are places we all talk about wanting to see, but for a week (or, if we’re feeling extravagant, two) each year we couldn’t be happier than we are simply journeying to the depths of Pembrokeshire, or meandering the dramatic Cornish coastline.

These fitful, almost-annual holidays were part of my and my sisters’ childhoods, and were something that we were lucky to experience. They’re still part of our story as adults and we plan to continue the tradition if we ever have families of our own.

Regardless of your destination, it appears that our almost eternal longing to disappear to somewhere new is often largely driven by escapism. The character of Emily herself eventually comes to the conclusion that she “ran away”, without even realising that she’d done it.

Perhaps it is true that all of us would like to escape, but I can’t help but wonder what precisely it is that we are trying to leave behind?

I can only speak for myself and from the few conversations I’ve had, as well as the handful of posts I’ve seen, but on the whole many people I know appear to live relatively pleasant lives. They just aren’t necessarily consistently ‘grammable’.

The truth is, life will, for most of us, probably remain the same irrespective of our postcode or where we’ve been, even if we’re convinced that we were born in the wrong village, town, city, county, country, or continent.

I’m 99.9% certain I would have thrived in Scandinavia, but ultimately I’d still almost certainly begin every day by eating breakfast, would spend much of my week at work and my life would consist of navigating various relationships. Just as it does now.

And yet, I still keep a list. Copenhagen and New York currently claim the two top spots, although perhaps it’s time for Paris to nudge into first place.