On Strange Lights and the Silicon Supremacy.

A few nights ago I saw something unusual in the eastern sky. It was around two o’clock in the morning and I was on my way to bed. The window in my bathroom faces east and the first thing I noticed was usual enough – the blinking wing light of a passenger plane heading north-west out of East Midlands Airport. And then my eye was caught by a most unusual pattern of lights just above the horizon at the top of the hill.

It consisted of nine orange lights arranged in three vertical rows of three forming a vertical rectangular shape. It moved slowly across the sky – rather slower than the aircraft lights heading in the opposite direction – and then stopped. The lights were much bigger than those on the plane suggesting that the whole pattern was bigger than a commercial aircraft or maybe much closer. It stayed still for a short while before descending and disappearing behind the hilltop.

I hope my description is accurate enough to evoke a visual image because I’ve never seen anything quite like it before. My usual presumption when I see a stationery light in the sky rests on the almost certain likelihood of it being a helicopter, but I’ve never seen such a craft showing a pattern of lights like that. If anyone has a suggestion I would be glad to hear it.

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Meanwhile, my state of mind is not at its best. Over the past ten years my world has contracted to a point where it amounts to little more than tedious chores, troubled sleep, and trawling the internet for something to interest me, usually with little success. This morning I woke up disturbingly late and booted up my computer to find an email from my phone line provider. It was titled ‘You will soon lose your broadband’ and advised me that I was to make substantial changes to both my service provision and computer connections if I was to avoid being confined to the cyber wasteland.

Well now, being confined to the cyber wasteland amounts to being also confined to the functional wasteland these days, and so I rang my broadband provider and asked ‘what the bloody hell is going on?’ A long and fairly complex explanation was provided by a man with a strong Yorkshire accent (I think he said his name was John.)

I won’t bore you with the details; suffice it to say this: My proclivities lie in such areas as music, quality literature, philosophy, psychology, the state of the human condition, the beauty of landscape, and the meaning of life and reality. I’m not a techno type. I have to accept that the days when our functions were largely run by cables, physical switches, and electricity are gone because that’s the way it is. But the microchip leaves me cold and confused. And that’s how I felt after spending around half an hour talking – or mostly listening – to John (or whatever.)

The one heartening thing he said was that these changes might not have to be made until the end of the year. I wondered whether I might be able to conspire to expire before then, because that would save me the trouble, wouldn’t it? Maybe I’ll feel different tomorrow (if I have a tomorrow.)