The Reversal

Welcome. I have decided to start a periodical. I decided this some time ago, with enormous conviction, and have spent every day since reconsidering it. That it exists at all is the most out-of-character thing I have ever done, and I intend to make up for it by changing my mind about everything inside it.

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This Week I Am Certain Of

I am certain, this week, that no message has ever needed to be answered immediately, and that most have not needed to be answered at all. The telephone in my pocket disagrees. It buzzes with the urgency of a fire alarm to inform me that a man I met once, in 2011, has changed his photograph. I have begun to treat the notification as I treat the doorbell during dinner: as a suggestion, made by a stranger, that I stand up. I shall not stand up. A gentleman replies when he is ready, which in my case is never, and beautifully.

My Last Reversal

This is the first issue, and so I have, strictly speaking, nothing to retract. I have therefore retracted the paragraph directly above it. On reflection, some messages must be answered at once, chief among them my own, and I now hold that any man who ignores his notifications is a coward hiding behind his own pocket. I believe this as firmly as I believed the opposite, which was four minutes ago. Growth is like that. It arrives suddenly, from the exact direction one was already facing, and asks to be thanked.

The Register of Modern Indignities

The Register opens today and will never close. It will outlive this periodical, and very possibly its author, accruing forever, in the manner of interest, or regret.

1. The self-checkout that accuses one, by name, of an unexpected item, when the item is one's own hand, placed in the bagging area in good faith.

2. Reply-all.

3. The progress bar that climbs to ninety-nine per cent and there, in full view of the household, sits down.

4. Being asked, by a machine, to confirm that I am not a robot, and hesitating.

In Defence Of the Unanswered Email

It has become fashionable to answer one's email. I will not join the stampede. The unanswered email is not a failure of character; it is a monument to restraint, a small cathedral of things I have declined to say. (I keep, in the drafts folder, a reply to a message from March that I am ageing, like a cheese, until it is ready.) Every inbox is a museum, and I am its most careless and most devoted curator. To answer promptly is to admit the message mattered. To answer never is to grant it the one thing it truly wanted, which was to be taken seriously, forever, by a man who will not be rushed.

A Word From My Apostrophe

His inbox has nine thousand unread.

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Firmly, and until further notice,

Mr Fickle