Many people find bald, unvarnished truths so disturbing, they prefer to ram their heads in the sand and start dreaming at the first sign of scientific reality.
Until recently, I was an ebook sceptic, see; one of those people who harrumphs about the βphysical pleasure of turning actual pagesβ and how ebook will βnever replace the real thingβ. Then I was given a Kindle as a present. That shut me up. Stock complaints about the inherent pleasure of ye olde format are bandied about whenever some new upstart invention comes along. Each moan is nothing more than a little foetus of nostalgia jerking in your gut. First they said CDs were no match for vinyl. Then they said MP3s were no match for CDs. Now they say streaming music services are no match for MP3s. Theyβre only happy looking in the rear-view mirror.
I liked that sort of thing, those one-off stories like 'Tales of the Unexpected,' 'Hammer House of Horror,' 'The Twilight Zone' and 'Alfred Hitchcock Presents.'
It's hard to think of a single human function that technology hasn't somehow altered, apart perhaps from burping. That's pretty much all we have left.
If your home is anything like mine, it contains several rarely explored crannies stashed full of archaic chargers, defunct cables, and freshly antiquated gizmos whose sole useful function in 2011 is to make 2005 feel like 1926, simply by looking big and dull and impossibly lumpen.
In the early '80s, the arcade game Pac-Man was twice as popular as oxygen.
You can tell a lot about a person by the way they treat waiters and shop assistants, especially when you are one.
I've got no attention span.
Games get a bad press compared with, say, opera - even though they're obviously better, because no opera has ever compelled an audience member to collect a giant mushroom and jump across some clouds.
Humans will always babble. If someone wants to tweet that they can't decide whether to wear blue socks or brown socks, then fair enough. But when sharing becomes automated, I get the heebie-jeebies.
Like bankers, top footballers are massively overpaid, but at least you comprehend what they're doing for the money.
Online, you play at being yourself.
The fashion industry is an immense cultural and social blight that only gets a free pass because its would-be detractors are scared it'll start criticising their haircut.
Banking, as far as I can tell, seems to be almost as precise a science as using a slot machine. You either blindly hope for the best, delude yourself into thinking you've worked out a system, or open it up when no one's looking and rig the settings so it'll pay out illegally.
Ever since about 1998, when humankind began fast-forwarding through the gradually-unfolding history of progress, like someone impatiently zipping through a YouTube clip in search of the best bits, we've grown accustomed to machines veering from essential to obsolete in the blink of a trimester.
Brexit is a harbinger for Trump, really.
When it comes to something like Brexit, I am part of the liberal-media London bubble, and so, to me, voting to leave was madness. My perspective was that it was cutting off your nose to spite your face.
My career path is like crazy paving - it goes all over the place.
At 16, I was drawing cartoons, and I wanted to carry on being a cartoonist.
'MasterChef' delivers all the reassuring, cadenced repetition of an endless chore without any of the bothersome elbow grease.
