Frank and Hester stripped their mother’s house; the house she died in. And their father before her. Annihilated the heavy oak furniture, the bread cupboard with its church-door hinges, the Gotische schrank with gothic tracery doors façading black-watch-beetle-ridden buttressing, the round table across whose patina their parents angrily threw oranges at one another. Only the paler walnut of a great-uncle’s Biedermeier armoire massively loomed in an upstairs bedroom, an unmoveable solitary beacon in an amorphous plain of magnolia, mist and mushroom walls, tawny carpets and curdled-cream roller blinds.

The present system of punctuation was pretty much devised by Alexandrian scholars for the public performance of written texts. Emailed text has a larger repertoire of performative iconography, or reading-tone-of-voice signs. Like these:

;-)   wink
:-(   frown
:-D   big smile
:-{)  smile with moustache

Then there’s a whole stack of ‘hakspek’; abbreviants like BWT (By The Way), BTDTGTTS (Been There, Done That, Got The T-Shirt) and TTFN (Ta Ta For Now) which double as club jargon and a meter of our times. Not to mention function-specific conjugations such as I grep, you telnet, we ftp’d, they flame ...

 

Lines to the Word Processor 

Teach me how to cut and paste
To edit out the parts that are not neat
Retrieving a clean crisp laser print
From the wrinkled scrawl of a sullied sheet

Teach me how to search and replace
The sour taste of inelegant lines
To repaginate and undo
Find better words for other times 

Teach me how to define styles
To weave a text with untangled strands
Keeping the headings separate
And the paragraphs in different bands Teach me how to open and to save
Playing with thoughts unattached
Fingering with point and click
Mutely pressing for the trick
To close files that are not matched
And find the self that has been snatched

 

 

When they came to arrest me, I wasn't suprised. I just thought, How come it has taken them this long? What did surprise me was how civilised they were. Two men and the token woman PC. Well she looked token, eyeing my bookshelves curiously as if she didn't come into contact with that volume of volumes every day. It was she who jangled – I mean she was the one who must have had the cufflinks stowed away. They have to be careful with murder. But it was PC Derek who did all the talking. All that, you don't have to say anything, but if you do ... stuff. So I said, could I leave a note for the children when they came home from school, and could I ring my friend Susie to come over, and could I – I don’t know why I thought of this, could I bring my laptop. If I hadn't said that, everything might have been completely different..