It’s not that I wasn’t warned – WordPress has been telling me for ages that something to do with Google apps was about to stop working but, being both lazy and unable to understand most of their technical information I ignored it and put it aside with letters from the bank and HMRC.
I ask this as a kind of rhetorical question: what could cause you most distress? …. a diagnosis of some rare but curable disease or losing your phone? Having been on three fast-track referrals for suspected cancers (none right) in as many months I can tell you that my world ended momentarily when I clicked on WordPress yesterday only to be told that “it” (no amplification) was no longer supported. It took a few minutes of intense meditation and heart-rate control to determine that the bereavement was far more limited than the extinction of ten years of work. The only thing that had happened was that a small shortcut app to the blog has been discontinued following a bit of a theological row between several behemoth sized companies about the number of blogger brains you can arrange on the head of a pin.
The remedy for this temporary extinction event was simple. I just had to search for the Potwell Inn and up popped my site with everything apparently working. However, my insatiable curiosity soon got the better of me and I ended up searching for my blog on Google Gemini, the AI app where I received a full report on the Potwell Inn which described all of my topics of interest in detail and (I thought) rather approvingly. There was a tendency to centre things on my more recent postings which gave the location of the Potwell Inn as Doynton – a small village near here where I once (maybe 50 years ago) did a talk for the young farmers but where we occasionally visit the local pub which I’m happy to give a shout-out to. The Cross House does some good food in a lovely atmosphere but it’s not the Potwell Inn, largely because the Potwell Inn – in the form that I write about – doesn’t exist anywhere except in my imagination and in my memories of HG Wells’ comic novel A History of Mr Polly from school days where it was a set book. The mere mention of the author and title should alert you to the archaeological nature of my affection for a short novel that, as a very shy and bewildered; possibly neuro-diverse teenager, built up as a safe space in my mind.
So the bad news for those of my readers who have wasted time searching for the Potwell Inn (one actually turned up on the allotment one day, and another wrote to me about one of the several imposters that actually exist in bricks and mortar) I’m sorry. The Potwell Inn is just a mental bolt-hole for an undiagnosed neuro-diverse old bloke, tumbling at speed towards his 80th year. On the other hand everything else, everything I’ve ever written about is real. Madame is my real partner of 60 years (we met when she was 15) we really have an allotment and all the plants, fungi, places and adventures are true, the campervan and it’s multiple vicissitudes is real too. So the really amusing fact is that Gemini got everything completely right about the Potwell Inn apart from one very important detail: it doesn’t exist.
Now I always thought that the power to confer existence on a being – and even the word being seems to confer some kind of existential reality – but stepping away from that whirlpool – the power to confer existence is reserved to God, or the Tao or some kind of immortal, invisible, ineffable superpower. If you look for Google Gemini in the scriptures you won’t find it lurking anywhere in the prehistory before Adam and Eve had to get their kit on in a hurry and Cain murdered Abel. I mean, seriously, Google doesn’t figure before sex and death (the subject of the only joke I can remember my lovely psychoanalytic psychotherapist Robin cracking. I’d told him about a dream I’d had of walking down Hotwells road being followed by two elephants. He replied with “I’m a Freudian, they must be sex and death!”)
Anyway, I think I’ve uncovered the Achilles’ heel of the whole AI bubble. It confers existence where it has no right. We avoid UPF’s – Ultra Processed Foods- but they only kill us one at a time. Ultra Processed Facts can kill whole families, cities, cultures; in fact there seems no limit to its potential for harm. Going back to the bible just for a moment (I promise) you might wonder why idolatry gets such a bad press; even making it to Moses’ ten most wicked things in the Guardian. The answer is that what idolatry does is worship the partial instead of the whole incomprehensible but beautiful thing. It takes the easy way around the mountain.
So to get back to the Potwell Inn, you’ll see one category that I never use – it’s the one entitled Uncle Jim. He is the violent drunkard brother of the licensee of the fictional Potwell Inn, known only as the fat lady. Gemini, by the way, can’t bring itself to use the word fat and substitutes plump thereby daring to change the text! Polly accidentally removes Uncle Jim from, well- life I suppose – in a farcically comical fight which accidentally gives him a new identity. I don’t use the Uncle Jim tag because in my version of the Potwell Inn he’s gone forever, vanquished and washed up on a beach wearing the wrong jacket. All other contenders for the Uncle Jim slot are automatically given life-bans from my pub. The little river runs gently by, unpolluted by agricultural runoff and raw sewage. Beavers build their dams upstream and wildlife flourishes on the banks. I just need one place in my head where the darkness has no dominion.
