Category: Nine Bells

To be writing on a blog in this day and age is, let’s be honest, like being a scrivener of three-decker novels in the days of the paperback original. Or, perhaps more correctly, to be a paperback writer in the age of TikTok. And yet, all I ever wanted to be was a paperback writer. Affordable, portable books that would eventually get remaindered or traded or dumped into a charity shop where someone like the fourteen year old me could find them and discover new worlds and that crucial sense of not being alone.

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No, literally. Every now and then I have to dig all the chicken shit out of the bare-dirt floor of the chicken coop, break it up and shovel it into the compost bins, and then put down a layer of wood chips. So I’ve spent the evening digging out the coop, shoving dead wood into the electric shredder and then shovelling shit into the bins.

This week I’ve been thinking about things you can’t do with a phone in your hand or otherwise demanding attention. It was less of an issue when I was younger, because phones wasn’t as demanding but also because I was doing a lot of things you can’t do with a phone in your hand, like raising a kid. She’s been out of the house ten years now, and I shed a lot of constant vigilance with her leaving, and the Other World crept in around the edges. I started working on the garden, what, three years ago? And now I find myself suddenly surprised at how long I’ve been disconnected for. That ache in my hands is from shovelling shit now. And it’s going to make the plants grow/

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I’ve experimented with vaping several times over the last, what, fifteen years? With very little impact on my smoking habit. Finding one that doesn’t make me cough up both lungs or sicken me with its flavour has always been a challenge. Disposable vapes are now illegal in the UK, so I’ve been looking again at the refillable rechargeable ones.

Vaping quickly became a hobbyist pursuit, somewhere between motorcycle fanciers, computer modders and technically minded drug addicts with complicated freebasing interests. Vape stores are a mess of specialist language, and pretty much every bit of every vaping device is a proprietary object. Buy a Vaporesso and you have to buy Vaporesso bits for the lifespan of the device. E-liquid, nicotine salts, freebase, other weird juices, all with their own taxonomies, strengths, combinations and subspecies.

The last time I quit smoking, I was sick for five years and only felt better when I lit up again (at a funeral). I don’t expect to fully quit this time. I don’t expect it to work at all. But I feel like I’ve deciphered enough text to order a refillable rechargeable vape pen and the correct replacement coils and the right kind of liquid — and if I’m lucky the liquid will be palatable, though it seems impossible to find a flavour that pairs with coffee or red wine the way a cigarette does – to give it a go one more time.

I don’t smoke in the house. A vape pen might let me “smoke” in the office again. There was a time when I was that typical old-world writer hunched over a keyboard with a cigarette burning next to it, coffee in the cop and whisky in the jar.

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At the top of the year I turned off pretty much all my news app notifications on my phone. I read the surface of a dozen news providers in the morning over coffee and then put it all away til the evening, when I’ll catch up a bit, read a few longer pieces, then watch a bit of Bloomberg, Newsnight or Peston on television. This is very much an old person’s way of doing news. Read the paper in the morning, watch the analysis in the evening.

I read something the other day that characterises my practise as what is now being called “news avoidance.” Even journalists like Lyse Doucet have checked out of the churn.

(I read a piece in February containing the following quote: “For most people, social media gives you this sense that unless you care about everything, you care about nothing. You must try to swallow the world while it’s on fire.”)

Personally, I just didn’t want my day to be punctuated every thirty seconds by a dozen news providers all sending the same headline about American politics.

But. I have a friend who’s been telling me she wants to talk politics with me but can’t because I’ve “gone zen.” Between that and being indirectly shamed for news avoidance, I think it’s probably time to reconnect with that part of life. A bit.

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Skimmed this article, don’t recall where it was linked from – Jaymo, maybe? – and came across this:

Muted a whole bunch of political / upsetting terms. Unfollowed people posting non-stop dread bait. This was crucial to regaining an even keel.

Dread bait! Isn’t that a perfect descriptor for a certain kind of posting? Maybe dreadbait, as one word, to sit next to doomscrolling? Dreadbait for the doomscroll. Everybody knows someone who scatters dreadbait.

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Cultural drift: “the gradual, uncontrolled changing of a culture, with its distinctive norms, values, and patterns of behavior, over time.”

That seems terribly old, verging on quaint, now. Art is a monoculture now, to be sure, everything smoothed into a beige infinite by streaming. But everything else that constitutes a common culture? There is no longer broad consensus on whether or not the earth is flat. Nob0dy wants to claim constant cultural churn as the legendary Singularity, the endpoint of Timewave Zero where everything changes and remains always changing from that point on. But, if you’re looking for a condition of uncontrollable fracturing of cultural norms, that’s probably what we’re living in.

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Remember when, in the very early days of the pandemic, Tom Hanks contracted Covid and everyone was like “oh no protect Tom Hanks at all costs”?

A marker of how extremely online I once was is that I was waiting for a post to drop within forty-eight hours headlined “Revealed: Tom Hanks secret Chinese wet market bat-fucking tour launched pandemic”

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It sounds very nautical, but there’s actually no such thing. Ship’s watches were marked by a system of eight bells. There was no ninth bell. I’ve heard stories that the term “nine bells” meant “do not wake me.”

In English churches, however, there was once a specific nine-bell ring. The Nine Tailors meant that a man in the village had died.

Nine bells. Don’t try and wake me, I’m already dead.

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