Let’s quantify that. Let’s pin it down flat and dissect it.
I can’t write a column in the gaps. You can’t write a column at all.
So, I can’t go from A to B at time t. I have to go at t+n. My column suffers. My life becomes gappy. The taxi is late, right now, as I write this. It’s taking its time.
When it gets here, it’ll parp and toot. It’ll flash and honk. Suddenly there will be a need for hurrying.
I want my car back, so that I can hurry on my own terms and in my own time. I want my own time back. I don’t like taxis, because of the gaps. I can’t use trains, because the nearest station is ten miles away and the trains only go to Coventry and who wants to go to Coventry? How would I get to the station? It’s in a bad area. I wouldn’t want to go there on foot.
In a tank, maybe. In a Panzer. In an ambulance, more likely.
But not on foot.
And not in a bus.
I don’t do buses.
Have you seen the people on buses? Have you? They come in three types. Bus drivers, still learning how to use the gears and the brakes and the road. People too young to drive, although they should be able to hotwire a car. What’s wrong with young people these days?
The other type has subtypes. The dead, the doomed, the dispossessed. They wear bad clothes and don’t clean them. They live with their mothers.
I’d hate to see their mothers.
They look like child molesters or serial killers. They look like victims.
So, I’m waiting for the taxi, and writing this to fill in the gap.
If I’m lucky, it won’t be a long wait.
If I’m really lucky, this column will cover the fare.
It was a short column for Les. Sometimes he’d have half a page to himself, and sometimes only a paragraph. I folded the paper and looked out of the window. The view was different from the top floor. I didn’t usually travel by bus. I had an Audi. But it wasn’t well, and it had gone to the garage.
‘They’ll rip you off,’ said Dermot, meaning the mechanics. ‘They’ll have seen you coming a mile off. You can’t go on the bus. It’s full of scutters. They’ve all got nits. They’ve all got satchels and scabies. You want your car back.’
II
I did want my car back. You’d know why, if you’d ever been on the 256k bus. It goes every fifteen minutes on average, apparently managing this by running every two minutes at three in the morning, when there’s no one at the bus stops, and once an hour during daylight hours. All bus passengers have a look of despair, forlorn pale things counting their change in the petrol fumes. Women with six children occupy entire decks, men with Elvis haircuts and their hands in their pockets sit next to you and breathe like donkeys. Everyone smokes rollups. At every other stop someone gets on with the wrong change. They go from seat to seat asking if anyone can change fifty pee. No one admits that they can. Everyone looks out of the windows. Everyone puts a bag on the seat next to them.
A boy with cropped ginger hair and an idiot expression sits in front of you, one seat to the left, with his head turned around, staring blankly at you the whole way home.
III
I write small computer applications, using Delphi as a front-end for Oracle databases. Databases are logical, until people get near them and put data in. Then they turn into a mess. I write small applications – applets – to allow users to get at the data and fix it. The trick is not to allow them to do anything. The trick is to give them buttons to click on and primary colours. If it beeps at them from time to time they’re delighted. I can program without working at it. It’s something that just clicks with me. I pick up computer languages. I read books about them for fun.
‘You fucking would, you sad git,’ Dermot would say. ‘It’s the only thing you do pick up. You don’t pick up women, that’s for bloody certain. What happened to that Julie? Where’s she gone to? Let me guess, you told her all about fucking operating systems and she went out for cigarettes and never came back? You sad man. Computers. Sad.’
I had a PC at home, a 500 mhz Pentium III with 128 meg on board and a 32-meg TNT2 graphics card. State of the art for a couple of months. I wrote applets on it I could have written on a 486.
You can’t have a slow PC if you’re a programmer. You wouldn’t be able to hold your head up in company. You can have horror stories about the Amstrad you learned on, or how long it took to learn the keystrokes for Spectrum Basic. Remember the Spectrum? Little thing that had rubber keys and four colour-coded shift keys; every other key could have four meanings depending on the combination of shift keys you held down as you pressed it. You have to know about them. You need to have experienced them. But you can’t have a slow PC now unless it’s a spare, wired up as part of your own little LAN or sitting in the corner running an algorithm to find the highest prime number.
My pretty little desktop PC was more powerful than things that filled rooms in the seventies. It could do billions of calculations a second. It could plot millions of points instantly, do four-dimensional trigonometry, produce print-quality images, connect to the Net and kick-start the revolution.
I played games on it.
I have played games on an old ZX Spectrum, and on a Commodore 64, and on an Atari ST and now on a PC that has none of its original components. Everything has been upgraded. Everything has been replaced at least once.
I have also owned a couple of consoles, an old Sega Megadrive with a dodgy converter and a Nintendo 64 that was better than a PC four years ago. I have drawers full of computer games, video games, video-games magazines. I used to read science fiction, all those books about unhelpful robots and alternate universes.
Video games are an alternate universe. Each one is a window onto a new world. They are self-referential like no other art-form, and they started that way. The first widely available game was Pong, marketed by Atari.
Atari – the word – is from a game itself. It’s from Go, and it’s the state a group of stones is in when it has one liberty left, when it’s in imminent danger of capture.
Games are like that. They feed on their own history.
Pong gave you control of a bat; you had to hit a ball with it. The ball was square. Lo-rez was hi-rez at the time. Pong had one control, and three instructions. The best one was:
Avoid missing ball for high score.
Dermot is right.
I am boring about computers.
IV
I met Dermot six or seven years ago. I was on a training course in Birmingham, learning the fundamentals of object-oriented programming. The course was in a small building on a new business park close to the NEC. It was the peak time for new business parks. They were everywhere, and they were all the same. Each one had the small, flat, white building that did computer training, the grey warehouses for furniture companies, the sprawling blocks occupied by new businesses going out of business, the inconvenient out-of-town sorting office. There was a van selling burgers and egg baps. There were signs with arrows in bright primaries. The road names were misleadingly pleasant and rural.
On the first two days of the course, I went to the restaurant for lunch, along with everyone else. It was the usual business park restaurant, with no evening menu and no atmosphere. Secretaries leaned across tables. Men shouted into mobile phones. Nothing meaningful happened. We had scampi that had been constructed from recycled scales, tails and fins. We had French fries made out of anything but potato.
On the third and last day of the course I said I had some work to catch up on at lunchtime. I’d had