Scanner darkly, looking back

I am currently reading A Scanner Darkly, by Phillip K Dick. It must have been tricky living with that name. I first started reading it in the summer of 2022, when we were on an extended family holiday in I think Somerset. It seemed quite suitable, with its ellision between thoughts and reality, and the confusion of personalities. My mother in law was still grasping at reality back then. Perhaps sadly, it was not drugs that were making reality slip out of her reach.

So in one of the hardest January fears of all the years, I have started reading it again. It is quite comforting in its wrongness about a dystopian future. If I am so afraid of my own decisions, and of what might be, it is worth remembering that back when I was born, it seemed plausible to imagine a future in which everyone was addicted to drugs. They still might be, but they’ll be weight loss drugs that will probably make Invasion of the Body Snatchers look like free will, so everybody will be very happy, free of their wants and needs, thin and ever-living in the poverty of their non existent pensions

I mean, the present is fine, compared with the Scanner dystopia. Everything is indeed captured on CCTV, but general incompetence about requesting, sorting or retrieving the footage makes it more or less meaningless as a threat to civil liberties.

There might be a proxy war going on that leads to a clash of civilizations and views on how our lives and morals should be organised. It might have gone as far as completely redefining reality, and organising the facts to suit a political side. Either you think banning Israeli footballers from matches for their political views is jaw dropping hypocrisy, or you apparently think in the fragile straight line that because you oppose Israel, any punishment dished out to an Israeli for supporting their own country is balancing the scales of whatever US led conspiracy you think runs the world. It used to be that those people were on the margins, sitting in a pub in Bow somewhere, blathering on about the protocols of the elders of Zion while everyone laughed. Twitter has now put all the idiots of the world in touch with each other, and created more useful idiots to keep spreading their desire to fit coincidences and predictable consequences of history into a grand narrative.

No dumbness can’t find an idiot to spread more dumbness.

But we have home delivery for everything. We can look everything up. We can book anything and everything ourselves. We can find a satellite to show us exactly what our Airbnb half way up a French mountain really looks like. We never need to speak to anyone for anything, we can just wave a QR code or a bar code or in some cases nothing and walk out the shop.

Meanwhile, all I have is fear of selling my comfort blanket of a house, and of not finding that safety ever again. Every shop I have walked into, every radio station I’ve switched on in the last 24 hours has suddenly played George Ezra’s Anyone For You, which is surely the most upbeat song ever written. We kept playing it last year on our summer holiday in Germany, because the kids kept asking for it. That hire car nearly bankrupted me, but it was a wonderful holiday. The kids were really happy. I want them to be happy.

So I’m taking them away from the only home they’ve ever known, to stick them in a school I don’t even know, but I want to give them the academic opportunity to succeed. What may happen is that without their security, they lose motivation and fail all their exams and I live in a town that I’m even more lonely in, in a house with none of the special memories of babies.

The loneliness makes perspective very hard. I just get on the train, come home, play my violin, watch TV and got to bed. And weekends are for trying to catch up all that lost time with the kids, not for trying to build or maintain my own friendships. Why would anyone like me anyway? I am quite thoughtless; I don’t care about birthday cards; I am no good at wrapping presents and I am often very strident in my views, whilst hypocritically belittling other views if I consider them ill informed. I remember the time I was saying that donating to cancer charities is a bit like an insurance policy, which should really just be an extra tax levy to pay for our unfunded longevity. It was really quite awkward when the person I was talking to said she was raising money because her father died. Awkward and predictable. I’ve got a bit better since then.

I’m also increasingly disorganised, and whenever I see a scheduling clash, instead of immediately reorganizing (I’m not so disorganised that I can’t see it at least a week ahead), I run around trying to fix it, then have to cancel at the last minute when it’s unfixable, and look like an unreliable idiot. So that definitely loses friends. Then again, I’m not sure I wanted to make friends with someone who cries in Disney movies, whilst talking continuously.

I will move to Buckingham. Maybe. We will sell the only house I’ve owned, where we were happy. It’s hard to be confident and optimistic that it’s us that’s happy, not the house. I guess I believe in the spirit of houses, but also dislike the uncertainty of a new area, living in an ancient small town. Could be weird locals with pitchforks. Milton Keynes is such a mix of people that you can have a completely different life two streets away. My life is just my living room anyway.