Safety

Danger. I’m writing in the bath. It’s 9pm. I think I’ll try and go to bed. Dark and quiet time and I’ve made peace with that. This is the hibernation station. Normally that would be completely uncomplicated, but Lou is here and her life is the opposite to mine right now. She’s been doing two shows today, people on the show are dropping like flies so there’s never a moment where she can relax and take stock. It’s full on for her and it’s full off for me.

Brian and I, we made Christmas as we so often do. It was the usual mixture of personalities, a bit less gelled than previous years, partly my own fault for getting smashed too early, partly just how it all fell together.

Ahh shit that’s Lou needing a pickup from Sloane Square. Out the bath and dryinh. Might leave the water for when I get back. She doesn’t feel safe walking the London streets alone. Bollocks.

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Grumpy damp chauffeur picked up Lou. Grumpy damp chauffeur counted humans – (one) – but of course that was counter productive because of course “it’s always worse when there are fewer people” and suddenly there’s a prism where the safest and quietest streets in London are still a threat.

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Now grumpy damp chauffeur is in a hot bed. I put the blanket on so I could go from bath to bed, but then suddenly the road beckoned and I found myself wishing the battery issue with Bergman was more than merely my auto handbrake trying to be cleverer than people.

What are we unleashing, as we give territory to these things? The stated intention is to make them cleverer than us, but when things get cleverer than other things they work out how they can consume them for their own benefit and do so. Right now my auto handbrake is a fucking moron, but in time there might be ones that are trying to kill people instead of just inconveniencing them in the name of one of the most powerful of the new gods, the cloying masked oppressive face of SAFETY, RAVAGER OF FREEDOM, surrounded by zealous and worthy priests and priestesses.

I didn’t drop my phone in the bath at the start of this blog. I might have. It was a silly risk considering how much use I get from this thing. I’m glad I didn’t have something preventing me from doing it. “It seems like you have the phone in the bath with you.” Like when I type into Waze when I’m driving and I have to answer extra questions and spend more time telling it I’m a passenger before it lets me update. There was a friend of Jack’s who went on and on about the fact I cycle without a helmet. Made everything weird. Obedience over practicality. I took a Lime bike on spec the other day. They could kill the whole economy of that by making cycle helmets legal. And it’s the worthiness of average citizens that has allowed this general creep of loss of freedom which has become a fascist rallying cry because the people who like people keep getting so fucking needlessly worthy and passive aggressively controlling about it.

Anyway. This has rambled because I’m tired tired tired and in bed with one eye open in a hot bed after bath-interrupted and a little drive through Chelsea. Have a lovely New Year, darlings.