The Reversal

Three issues. I am now, I fear, a man of routine, which is the very thing I began this periodical to escape. I shall have to escape the periodical next. Not yet. After this.

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This Week I Am Certain Of

I am certain, this week, that no one should be told the weather in advance. My grandfather looked at the sky. I look at a small icon that promises rain at four and delivers it, spitefully, at nine, having first watched me leave the umbrella by the door. To know the forecast is to be disappointed on a schedule. I have begun, as an experiment, to simply walk outside and be surprised, like an animal, or a Victorian.

My Last Reversal

Last issue I held that the group chat must be muted and never left. I have this morning left three. I feel the particular lightness of a man who has burned a bridge he was already standing on the far side of. Muting, I now see, was cowardice with the sound off. I regret every silence I did not make louder by leaving.

The Register of Modern Indignities

The Register, ever accruing.

8. The "quick call" that could have been an email, following the email that could have been nothing at all.

9. The cookie banner that offers me a free choice between "Accept All" and forty minutes.

10. Autocorrect, which has decided who I am and will not hear otherwise.

In Defence Of the Queue

It has become fashionable to resent the queue. I will not. The queue is the last place in modern life where the English agree on anything, namely the order in which we arrived. It is a democracy of the patient, a cathedral with no roof and excellent posture. (I once watched a man attempt to join it from the side. He is not spoken of.) To stand in a queue is to declare that some things are worth waiting for, chief among them the moment one reaches the front and discovers one has forgotten what one came for.

A Word From My Apostrophe

He left the group chats. They have not noticed.

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Firmly, and until further notice,

Mr Fickle