Memory and loss Google style

+​Dealing with being locked out of your emails is the new locked out syndrome (as opposed to being locked in). Impossibilities everywhere. Actually, I should better describe it as a form of cyber-euthanasia, where memory is extinguished and a previous life is rubbed out. But like a soul, all that was there carries on, albeit without any subjective experience, merely floating around in cyber-space without an owner. My memory is wiped clean, and now Google tells me on my new gmail account that I have used 0% of 15GB of free memory. Previously I was up to about seven or eight per cent. I had a long way to go even on my old account. And they say we only ever use 10% of our brain’s capacity. Anyway, the old gmail soul is floating around somewhere, inaccessible to all. All those stored messages, neatly filed away in various folders—they by definition cannot matter to me anymore, and all because I couldn’t remember my password! (Which is not to say that for years to come new messages won’t arrive at this dead soul gmail account, whispering their enticements into thin air.)
 
I will now inevitably set about starting a fresh filing system, storing stuff away in the pursuit of a post-modernist goal of memory and loss. The memory is that I save stuff. The loss is that I never bother going back to it. Thank you Google for clearing my memory with your by definition irretrievable verification codes!
 
I have to say that on Laurie Anderson’s rather beautiful album Landfall she speaks of her reaction to her flooded basement (and storage area) seeing her stored life’s objects  floating before her.
 
And I looked at them floating there in the shiny dark water, dissolving.
And the things I had carefully saved all my life becoming nothing but junk.
And I thought how beautiful how magic and how catastrophic.
 
Not quite the same as losing 10 year’s worth of emails, but makes you think dunnit?
 
+As many of my readers around the globe will know, I keenly read the Voice of Britain (aka the Daily Express) to see what’s going down. The Voice of Britain is now calling out Boris Johnson with
 
Boris Johnson Brexit failures: Three key broken promises
 
These broken promises are £350million (weekly) to the NHS, reducing VAT on energy bills and a big new trade deal with the US (on their terms of course, poisoned chickens and all). I’m guessing that if the Voice of Britain is getting pissed off with Johnson, his game may be up: the rot starts in the core. Bloody hope so!

+But all is not lost. Somebody called Ben Wallace, who it seems is the UK defence secretary has said (Speaking at the Falklands 40 Margaret Thatcher Day Lecture, hosted by the Policy Exchange think tank and delivered by Lord Moore, the former editor of The Daily Telegraph) “Our enemies should not doubt Britain’s determination to stand up to bullies, to defend those that cannot defend themselves and our values. Distance will not deter Britain, nor will the scale of the challenge. History is littered with the consequences of those that underestimated this small island. General Galtieri was no different.” One wonders quite how the UK would take back the Falklands if they were invaded again. But Wallace, pictured in his combat gear went on to say “I was privileged to have served with a Regiment that fought in the Falklands conflict.  In their 380 years history the Scots Guards have beaten Hitler, Napoleon, Tzar Nicholas 1st, and even George Washington.” (Thanks to the Telegraph for these precious quotes.) No mention of Afghanistan then. The levels of self-delusion in UK government circles knows no bounds. Whitehall now has more Winston Churchill’s than a Trafalgar Square souvenir shop. The world quivers in anticipation of our ministerial announcements. Reminiscent of Portillo’s 1995 Tory Party speech where he said that the letters ‘SAS send a chill down the spine of the enemy.’ At least in later life Portillo has made himself useful. I fear there may be no such luck for the current crop of bombastic duffers.