• the joy of a pre-Luddite universe

    If this was 1386 instead of 2014 the chances are I would not have had to spend the last hour of this fine Sunday morning staring at a screen trying to get various bits of the internet to work.  The chances are I would have been out in the fresh air  talking to friends and fellow villagers, the chances are we might have been singing our hearts out in some glorious gothic cathedral with the sunlight splintering through the new stained glass with the new invention, the pipe organ, thundering its notes out into the soundbox of the soaring roof.  The walls of this building would have been brilliantly coloured in reds and blues and greens and gold.  We women would have been wearing trailing gowns with long graceful  sleeves, the men in coloured hosen, with cloaks and their swords left in a heap at the church door.  Chances are we would not have wasted our eyesight, energy and attention on squiggling little shapes on a nasty mass-produced screen and getting absolutely nowhere.  Chances are.