%

If this blog is about anything real, then it ought not to duck out just because difficult things are happening. If (sounding hypothetical, but not being) an elderly relative is very ill, and they give you information at the hospital about their chances of survival, it may be expressed as, 'He has a 30% chance'. And this was said, and I duly sent this information off to various relatives, to put them in the picture. My mobile is a simple one, with a standard list of symbols on a top row display of the ones you need most - &, (, ), @, things like that. But then all of a sudden, I needed a different one so had to go to the 'show more symbols' display, and up came the bigger list and I pressed '%' to add to '30'. And now my mobile thinks that I really want to be using this % quite a lot, and so it has it at the ready for me on the top row all the time. Technology that thinks with me; it almost feels as though it is being sympathetic. It's probably not a bad thing to have some odd little personal reminder of mortality.

The path of a text message

But going off at a tangent because of thinking about text messages, a few days ago I was thinking how I'm one of the people in the world who doesn't really understand how many things work. Only today, I almost texted t'owd man to ask how to open the washing machine door. I was thinking about how text messages travel, and do they go flying through everyone's living rooms, all of them, each and every text (and all of a sudden I could see a lot of wavy lines)? I imagined that they must be like in that William Blake picture, sort of going up one prong of the dividers when you click 'send', and then back down the other prong to whoever clicks 'read'. So clever. Years ago, this new kind of washing powder came out, it was that bio-stuff, biological that's the word, and the advert for it - it would be totally unacceptable now, of course - had this bloke demonstrating its superior powers, and his wife standing by with dropped jaw asking, 'Is it a kind of bleach, Bob?' I think I am that woman, and now I'm not too bothered by it. In fact, it's a kind of liberation.

Oooh, it's late; time for me to go to bed with a picture book.