Do you remember I once wrote you a love letter? It was a real one, on paper, written with a pen in my terrible handwriting, an oddity even then when people were already used to emails and texts as channels of flirtation. I often wonder if you ever kept it, but have lacked the nerve to search for it. Knowing you, it’s tucked away somewhere safe.
No doubt you’re wondering why I’m writing to you now, over ten years later. After all, we live together now, we have a family - well, to be precise, we’ve added to the families we each already had, separately. I can talk to you at any time. I suppose you at least have the consolation this time that I’m using a keyboard, and that you don’t have to decipher my hand again. Well, you would have if you knew I was writing to you, that you would ever read this. But the truth is, you’re not, and you probably - hopefully - never will.
Let me tell you about yesterday, it might help explain. I know you hate it when I work at the weekends, but when I have contractors in, and when it’s essential that they have finished what they’re doing before the markets open on Monday morning, well, you wouldn’t want me at home anyway. Far better to be there, making sure there are no nasty surprises waiting for me. As you know, by about three in the afternoon it was all over bar the shouting, and I started home, cycling back in the spring sunshine, streets mainly deserted, as usual in the City on a Sunday. You’d texted a shopping list, so I stopped at that Sainsburys on the way home, the one that always seems noisy and cramped and slightly grubby. Overused, I think you called it once.
Anyway, once I’d knocked a couple of things off the list as being too bulky to carry on the bike, and added a much needed bottle of Pinot Grigio, I went to find a checkout queue. Three open, each ten deep, but they could spare a member of staff to direct me to the “self service” checkouts. So I put my usual mistrust of the things under wraps, swiped my Reward card, and picked up the first item to scan.
“Unexpected Item In The Bagging Area!”
“Excuse me”, I said to no-one in particular. “There’s nothing at all in the bagging area yet.”
“Unexpected Item In The Bagging Area!”
“Yes. You said. There’s nothing there. Can we get on please?”
“Unexpected Item In The Bagging Area!”
By this time, I had the attention of an orange-clad seventeen year old with the most amazing collection of pimples I have ever seen. He came over, swiped a card, punched a number on the screen and said “Try again, sir?”.
“Unexpected Item In The Bagging Area!”
“Sorry sir, it’s not supposed to do that. Do you want to try that one there, and I’ll close this one.
So I shifted everything across, swiped, scanned ...
“Unexpected Item In The Bagging Area!”
And that’s why you didn’t get your shopping yesterday. I just left it there, walked out, unlocked the bike and carried on home, stopping only at Mehmet’s for another bottle of wine and your bloody fags. The thing was, I wasn’t cross at the system that had frustrated me. Obviously, the rational approach would be to say that it’s a machine, you can’t be cross at it, there’s no point, but the reason for my lack of anger wasn’t to do with rationality, but empathy. It thought something was there when no-one else could see it. It would be easy to say that it was mistaken, that there was nothing there whatever it thought, if a machine can the said to think, to have an opinion. But what if it was right? What if there really was an item in the bagging area, something that you hadn’t seen coming, that you couldn’t work out how it had got there? What if only the machine could see it.
You know me. I’m a mathematician - or was - I deal with metaphors, patterns, ways of thinking. I’m used to seeing things that aren’t there in any real sense. And, right now, and for some time, I have had the feeling that there is an Unexpected Area In The Bagging Area of my life. Our lives. Our life together.
There’s an Italian proverb - Sicilian, I think - something to do with playing the fool to avoid a war. That’s exactly what I’m doing, turning a blind eye in preference to triggering a catastrophic confrontation. I could sit you down and ask you if there’s anything I should know. I just don’t know if I could deal with the answers. In fact, I’m not even sure if I know what the questions are.
David
