I’VE GOT THE WORLD ON A STRING [504]

“How long is a piece of string?” is a question intended to end further questioning, as nothing specific is left to answer. Indeed, I may have asked it to myself to stop deliberating on what topic to discuss here.

As an idiom, it is used where an item, or a thought, has no finite length or end point - you could continue deliberating until you reach an actual end. That may be what I was looking for.

I couldn’t tell you when I last bought a ball of string, or what the previous ball was used for - I must have given it to someone who suddenly realised they needed some string, and I had exactly the right amount on hand. 

One supermarket I visited this week sold a 40-metre ball of string, located among parcel boxes and packing tape, and looking about the same size as any amount of string I would see in similar circumstances. Is this the median length of string, the average amount that the average person needs? Providing a longer piece then becomes a specialist operation, as must be needing it in the first place.

The supermarket’s string would have cost me £1.45 - discovering I had no conception of how much string should actually cost, I also realised I had no idea of the price of a pint of milk, but when I don’t have milk in my coffee, that left one less question to answer.

There is one way to answer my ultimate question, following a cursory search online: two hundred metres. This was for a roll of green-coloured garden twine, and while I could see deals on multiple rolls of string, no single roll exceeded this length. 

There does appear to be an answer for at what length does a piece of string become commercially unviable - anyone needing more than that probably owns the means of production to make it themselves. There are numerous claims, mostly in the United States, to the largest ball of twine on Earth, but I couldn’t verify if various pieces are being tied together in these cases, or if fibres are being twisted together to continue the original piece, and am I sure I want an answer to that? The spectacle of the ball’s eventual size appears to be what’s most important here.

Aside from whether twine counts as string, and avoiding further idioms about “the ties that bind” and so on, the human capacity for curiosity will continue asking questions beyond the point where the answer is found, as I know from experience. If your mind doesn’t like being still, it will look for stimulus from itself. Asking a question that stops debate only invites questions about that question. Here’s a question: did the first person to ask about the length of a piece of string actually need an answer, or was the request then kicked into the long grass. Did they have to call it a day before someone read the riot act to them?

How long is a piece of string? Exactly as long as I need it to be.

YOU’VE MADE ME SO VERY HAPPY [503]

YouTube has become my main portal for listening to music, apparently by mutual agreement.

I still own a Sony Walkman MP3 player, holding thousands of songs in CD-quality FLAC format, alongside the CD themselves, but I mostly have only my phone while on the move, along with the headphones that connect only to that phone. I also still subscribe to YouTube Premium  which, in addition to removing advertising from around all videos, allows uninterrupted listening while my phone is in my pocket. For someone who once said that music is their drug of choice, this is a beneficial arrangement: Google gets my money, and I get unlimited music in good enough quality against the outside noise.

YouTube’s 2024 Recap pegged my listening habits as “The Time Traveller”: “my listening traversed the decades, melodically exploring eras all year long”. The words “lively”, “giddy”, “hopeful” and “rock” were given as overall descriptors. Musical moods were classified, in descending order, as upbeat, uplifting, happy, fun and energising. I was also in the top 0.1 per cent of listeners to Sir Elton John, with Madonna, XTC’s psychedelic pastiche project The Dukes of Stratosphear, and Tears for Fears not far behind. I found myself taking pride in what the data proved and affirmed.

Despite a separate YouTube Music app has been available since 2015, I only use the main app to listen to songs like they were regular videos. Non-music videos are also mostly watched via my television, where I also only get recommended videos based on my subscriptions list, once I blocked several news channels first. This has created, for the YouTube app on my phone at least, an algorithm trained only to recommend music to me – looking at the main page of the app on Friday 4th July 2025 recommended songs to which I had previously listened, songs like them, songs used in other videos I had been watching while using YouTube on my television, or songs I haven’t listened to in a while. The only deviations from this are a strap of the top news stories, from the channels remaining unblocked, and a video titled “Analog[ue] tricks that make a song great”, in case I want to try it myself.

The YouTube algorithm has been so useful to me that the music recommendations it had made has become articles here: “Breaking Down Barriers”, Sir Elton John’s opener from his album “The Fox”, came from recommending the videos made for that album, while a link to his buried psychedelic album “Regimental Sergeant Zippo” alerted me to its existence. My love of the Japanese synth pop group Yellow Magic Orchestra (YMO) was triggered by one track, “Rydeen”, being used as the background to a video of computer-generated animation. I may have heard “Take Me Home”, from Phil Collins’ enormously successful album “No Jacket Required” on the radio first, but listening to it on YouTube led me the ultra-infectious songs “Only You Know and I Know” and “Who Said I Could”.

I haven’t created a single music playlist in all the years I have used YouTube, only using the generic “Favourites” playlist, where songs sit among regular videos. I find myself sometimes going along with the mixes generated automatically by YouTube if I see songs I want to hear, but I most often make last-second decisions on what to hear next, sometimes acting upon the app’s suggestions. A recent lunchtime at work ran as follows: “Injected with a Poison” by Praga Khan (heard on the radio), “Break Out” by Swing Out Sister (YouTube suggestion), “Fire Brigade” by The Move (suggestion, heard previously), and “Hip to Be Square” by Huey Lewis and the News (suggestion, heard previously).

In all these cases, it was down to personal discretion as to which versions of the songs I heard. From searching artist and song names, do I then hear the official upload made fifteen years ago, or the alternative from an unknown channel from only three years ago? Sometimes, you must wade through numerous uploads to find the official one or settle before you get there. Age of video aside, the highest quality of sound available on YouTube, 256 kbps in AAC format, is equal to an iTunes download, and while I have gone on to buy a CD release to have the better quality, like “No Jacket Required” and “Regimental Sergeant Zippo”, there are many cases where I am not there yet. 

What I am finding myself increasingly doing is using YouTube for music at home as a shortcut over my Walkman – if everything is there, why go to my own library? If the quality is good enough for right now, why delay satisfaction until you get the best quality sound?

The recommendations themselves may also be of concern. I was recommended Emerson, Lake & Palmer’s version of “Fanfare for the Common Man” – the single edit, thankfully – but follows other recommendations from the 1970s and 80s: ELO, Swing Out Sister, Matt Bianco, Manfred Mann’s Earth Band, ABBA. The Carpenters, the theme to the BBC drama series “Howard’s Way”... Have I created a greatest hits radio station in my phone without realising, and should I consider it a problem?

This is why I always listen to the radio in addition to YouTube – you need to have someone share something new with you, because they won’t know what you have and haven’t heard.

I’D GET IT ONE PIECE AT A TIME [502]

As far as I know, the 8.2 litre V8 engine found in the gargantuan Cadillac Eldorado coupé and cabriolet from 1970-76 is the largest found in any production car. Originally rated at four hundred brake horsepower, regulatory changes in both emissions and the measuring of a car’s power reduced this to as low as 190 bhp, before Cadillac made the Eldorado an overall smaller car. Performance is unimpressive when viewed today, taking approximately 12.8 seconds to reach 60mph, on its way to a top speed of 110-115 mph, with an average fuel consumption of nine to ten miles per gallon.

In the eyes of a British person, that level of gas guzzling makes it cheaper to take the bus, before I also realised that figure is in American gallons, equivalent to about 7.5-8.3 miles per imperial gallon. Even if you don’t care about the environment, those figures would make you weep.

The existence of these different units of measurement can be found in the UK’s Weights and Measures Act 1824, which introduced standardised Imperial units for use throughout the British Empire. Meanwhile, the United States customary system of units, themselves standardised in 1832, derive from the previous British system that remained in use after the US became an independent country.

Encountering American units is a novelty for me because while imperial measurements have remained alongside the metric system in the UK, efforts to make businesses voluntarily comply with the system ended in 1980 [https://www.leighspence.net/2022/06/sixteen-tons-and-what-do-you-get-347.html], while certain units like cubic inches, bushels, furlongs, hundredweights and stones were prevented from use in trade by the Weights and Measures Act 1985, despite a 2020 amendment making them permissible to use as supplementary to other units. 

Therefore, a bottle of Diet Coke being described as twenty fluid ounces, or 1¼ pints, rather than just 591 millilitres was, for me, funny at the time, but also completely wrong. There used to be different measurements for different uses, like troy ounces and pounds for precious metals, and apothecary units for medicines, but the existence of separate wine gallons and ale gallons before Imperial standardisation explains why the American pint measure is too small: Britain continued with an amended ale gallon, adopting the standard 568 ml pint, while the Americans continued using the wine gallon.

Looking at Cadillac’s website today showed their non-electric cars’ engine capacity is now described in litres – the 8.2 litre Eldorado engine had instead described in advertising as 500 cubic inches, using the more common unit for car engine comparison at the time. Their page for the 2025 Escalade-V instead puts power output (682 bhp) and torque ahead of engine capacity, an added supercharger making the 6.2 litre engine size less of a factor in overall power. Elsewhere, the vehicles dimensions, from length and width to legroom and cargo space, is quoted in inches, or hundredths of inches (front legroom = 44.51”).

The most visible attempts at metrication in the UK was the decimalisation of Pound Sterling in 1971 [https://www.leighspence.net/2019/03/five-six-seven-eight-nine-ten-i-love.html], followed three years later by teaching metric weights and measurements in schools. Meanwhile, the metric system in the United States was legally recognised and protected in 1866, and the Metric Conversion Act 1975 made it the preferred system for weights and measures in US trade and commerce. 

However, this voluntary nature, and the continued teaching of both American and metric measures in schools, means both Britain and America are content to use two concurrent systems, the metric system linking them both. That the United States dollar has equalled one hundred cents since it was introduced in 1792, before the metric system was adopted by either country in any other form, appears to be a total anomaly.

THE BLAST THAT TEARS THE SKIES [501]

Before today, I have only seen Katsuhiro Otomo’s 2004 anime “Steamboy” once, just after its English dub had been released. I remember it wasn’t in ideal circumstances: it is one of only two films I have seen while on a plane, the other being “The Matrix”, but while I had seen that film many times - I hoped the gun fire would keep me awake during the long-haul flight - I was also able to fill in the detail lost by the reduced resolution of the smaller screen and the drone of the jet engines. Therefore, while I have watched “Steamboy”, I have only seen as much of it as watching it on your phone would allow today.

This would not do considering the level of detail in Otomo’s production, rivalled in animation perhaps only by his own masterpiece, “Akira” (1988), effectively the cyberpunk counterpart to “Steamboy’s” steampunk portrayal of industrial Manchester and London. I can now properly see the application of computer-generated imagery in whirling cogs and machinery, and into the moving of our view within spaces, or around objects. Over four hundred shots in “Steamboy” use CGI, and these can only be noticed closely through how these elements move ever so slightly differently from hand-drawn elements, none of which you can see on a smaller screen.

The science fiction author K.W. Jeter coined the term “steampunk” in 1987 to group together “gonzo-historical” works by the likes of himself, Michael Moorcock and Faren Miller, while a tradition of Japanese fascination with Victorian industrial Europe was evident in Hayao Miyazaki’s “Castle in the Sky”, released in 1986.

What I remembered of “Steamboy” was its having been set in the UK, and an “Akira”-like build-up and explosion. Watching it for the second time confirmed Manchester as the base where which the Industrial Revolution continuously pushed steam power as far as it could go - the Steam family is at the centre of these developments, in rivalry with Robert Stephenson, the real-life son of George Stephenson, around which a web of military and corporate espionage rages. The MacGuffin of the story is the “steam ball”, a pressurised power source with near-unlimited energy that defies explanation, Working much like a battery, three “steam balls” power a “Steam Castle”, built as a private pavilion at Great Exhibition taking place in London, which sheds its conventional armour to become a fortress that flies uncontrollably into the centre of London, destroying buildings as it goes.

I loved the film, with its sense of family humanising the machinery. I watched the full-length English dub of the film, with Sir Patrick Stewart as grandfather Lloyd Steam, Alfred Molina as father Edward Steam, and Anna Paquin as James Ray Steam, all highly inventive and intuitive about steam power to make science seem like magic, the metaphor of man becoming machine rendered literally in Edward to his detriment. The emotional pressure to succeed in their ambitions and to save the day helps to explain and mask the literal pressure of the machinery, which I only understood as far as the story needed me to understand it. However, having the corporate element of the military industrial complex being represented by a conglomerate head’s daughter, an analogue and namesake of Scarlett O’Hara from “Gone with the Wind” was a strange choice, but with there being no other female character for much of the film, you let that flourish slide.

The voices of Stewart and Molina, using their own accents, was perfect casting, but the Victorian industrial and imperial British setting was a lot to take in. I am very aware of my country’s history, but I know not to choke on the nostalgia of it: I visited post-industrial Manchester in 2019, stayed in a hotel that formerly housed a bonded warehouse and a hat factory; saw a still-working loom in the Museum of Science of Industry, with George Stephenson’s Rocket in the foyer; followed the disused train tracks alongside the new tram lines; and saw the rejuvenated media centre of Salford Quays, alongside the gallery of works by L.S. Lowry. Meanwhile, the might of the Royal Navy pored over in the London scenes highlighted both how much of its income the UK spent on defence at the time, and how many wars it expected to fight simultaneously at the drop of a hat.

I will be watching “Steamboy” again, but not until I see “Akira” once more. Ultimately, I spent much of my time watching the film thinking there will come a time when someone discovers electricity, and everything I have seen so lovingly depicted here will be wiped away, but I am more cyberpunk-minded than steampunk. Watch “Steamboy” for the family, but not for the nostalgia.

I’M BACK IN THE VILLAGE AGAIN [500]

Cover to The Ron Grainer Orchestra's soundtrack album

Surrounded by films, TV series and albums that I “will get to eventually”, my next experience must call out to me.

I do not understand how it took until two weeks ago before seeing, for the first time, “The Prisoner”, the postmodern and psychological science fiction spy drama that was first broadcast by ITV in 1967, but it arrived at the perfect moment.

I was in the right mood for a story about an individual shorn of their identity, dumped in a place where they must conform, their name and clothes assigned to them, kept constantly under surveillance, and forced to undergo psychological mind games to reveal information about the decisions they made.

Of course, for an allegorical story where all the characters are numbered, its setting and plots are surreal, individuality pitted against collective community, and need driving motive – for freedom, for information – its audience sees what it wants to see, and I am glad the premise wasn’t made more specific for that reason. I realised my above description of “The Prisoner” could also fit “The Matrix”, Neo being forced to exist as “Thomas Anderson” until they escaped the reality created for them.

I am fortunate that I watched “The Prisoner” by myself, forming my own view of it without knowledge of the extensive industry of merchandise, including clothing, further novels and comic books, and many books analysing the series – I will get to them all eventually.

What started this journey was ITV’s placing of the first episode, “Arrival”, on their YouTube channel “ITV Retro”, alongside episodes of “Thunderbirds”, “Stingray” and “Sapphire & Steel”. Not having uploaded subsequent episodes fast enough, I moved to ITVX, their own streaming service, where they saw fit to add four breaks for advertisements in each 48–50-minute episode – my solution was to watch at 10pm, when there was less inclination to sell to me.

I liked that I didn’t initially think Patrick McGoohan’s Number Six – we never learn his real name – was a spy. Someone living in a London townhouse and driving a Lotus Seven he built himself doesn’t automatically make Number Six a continuation of McGoohan’s John Drake from “Danger Man”, a show I’ve never seen. He could have been a civil engineer, or the inventor of a bottomless bag of peanuts – recalling the only time McGoohan reprised the role, on “The Simpsons” in 2000 – also with sensitive information wanted by the organisation behind The Village, represented by the constantly changing Number Two.

The opening titles justify their three minutes of total length, portraying McGoohan as a forcefully determined individual – indeed, he is the only person to appear in every episode – driving his Lotus into Westminster, walking down a long corridor to resign his unnamed position, thunderclaps accompanying Ron Grainer’s theme tune. Gassed at home while packing for a holiday, notably by a man in black driving a hearse – the fade to black after McGoohan passes out invites guesses on the reality of everything that follows – and waking up to find both himself and his room transplanted to The Village, we get the barest of explanatory dialogue, indicating where they have ended up, what they are being called, who is talking to them, what they want, and what they won’t say – who is “Number One”.

McGoohan is perfect as Number Six – headstrong, resourceful and confident, with a sense of self that does not rely on anyone else. He knows exactly who he is – not having to explain what that is to anyone should be taken as a given, not as a challenge. I would hope that, if I found myself in a similar situation, I would know when to fight, but I know the situation portrayed in “The Prisoner” is an allegory taking things to extremes, but you should always be on guard for when things take a turn.

In making The Village a pleasant, controlled community that Number Six ideally will never leave, what stops me from wanting to go there for a week was being unable to identify inmates from their guards, everyone a possible informant. With the Edwardian clothing and festive air abounding, does The Village evoke nostalgia for a time when everything was simpler, and everyone knew their place? Whether or not, the look of it did make me search for room rates at the Hotel Portmeirion during while watching the first episode.

My favourite episodes were early in the series’ run, balancing contemporary psychedelia and Cold War paranoia with themes of dream manipulation (“A. B. and C.”), doppelgangers and identity theft (“The Schizoid Man”), indoctrination (“The General”) and conformity (“A Change of Mind”) – being labelled in the latter episode as “unmutual” is as good as “cancelled” today, including the psychological torture, but without the simulated lobotomy. 

However, constant surveillance in “The Prisoner” means that any story could be subjected to “deus ex machina”: any character sympathetic to Number Six could really be working for Number Two, or think that Number Six is there to test their loyalty, while any location to which Number Six escapes could be part of The Village. Any scene could cut to Number Two watching the same view on a screen, camera seemingly available at all known points, commenting on the action, and revealing that all we have seen was under their control the whole time, because that is the community that The Village creates.

I don’t know if invention or necessity led to later episodes becoming more outlandish in their approach to storylines: transplanting Number Six’s mind another man’s body, McGoohan filming elsewhere at the time; beginning one episode as a Western, titled “Living in Harmony”, with Number Six as a sheriff who resigns for his own reasons, then imprisoned for his own safety, finally revealed as a roleplay using hallucinogenic drugs; and “The Girl Who Was Death”, featuring Number Six undercover as an English colonel, and later in a Sherlock Holmes costume, was really Number Six telling a story to children in a nursery, Number Two’s hope being that he would drop his guard enough among them to reveal more about himself.

I have since read that McGoohan wanted “The Prisoner” to be a seven-episode mini-series, but production company ITC, run by Lew Grade, who also owned ITV franchise ATV, wanted a twenty-six-episode series he could sell to American networks – what was hoped to be two thirteen-part series became one of seventeen, that took over a year to shoot. “The Prisoner” ultimately aired on CBS on Saturday nights during the summer of 1968, in place of “The Jackie Gleason Show”, directly opposite NBC’s broadcasts of Roger Moore in “The Saint”, another of Grade’s series. 

Most fortunately for watching “The Prisoner” today is its having been filmed in colour, again required to sell the show abroad, meaning I can enjoy a high-definition transfer of the original 35mm elements today, light years from the murky 405-line black and white TV standard in the UK of 1967. An odd outcome of this situation is revealing the artifice that would have been covered on first broadcast – back projection, photographed and painted backdrops, studio sets replicating outside scenes – that I chose to interpret as further evidence of the covert operations by Number Two and The Village, a further layer that no-one ever intended. However, iconic as it is, the “Rover” weather balloon monster, looks silly no matter how you look at it.

As famous as McGoohan’s cry from the end of the opening titles, “I am not a number, I am a free man!” is a line from the opening episode: “I will not make any deals with you. I've resigned. I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed, or numbered! My life is my own.” To get by in the real world, where the footprint of your identity is on record to make your day run, I realise that I must agree to all the above, but I want them to be correct – if we are all to be “prisoners”, as the show insinuates, then allow me some agency. I can admire Number Six, but I don’t want to be in his tennis shoes.

I’M WORKIN’ ON MY REWRITE [499]

In “The Further Adventures of an Artificial Intelligence Refusenik”, I have realised that, if I ever need to prove that I am indeed the author of anything to which I have placed my name, I may need to go back to writing out that work longhand or, at the very least, plan them out using pen and paper.

This may sound like the latest stop on a road to paranoia, but for as much flak as people gave Ed Sheeran for revealing how he employs a videographer to record his songwriting process, to avoid further lawsuits over perceived breaches in copyright, his need for incontrovertible proof of his own creative ability speaks of how much the assertion of authorship has, well, been taken as written up to now.

I have found it hard to write much in a creative capacity recently because the presence of A.I. makes the act of writing mechanical in a way that threatens my dream of making it a livelihood, a threat I could not have envisaged when I started writing articles in 2016. The continued use of A.I. may require people to prove they did not use it to write anything, from a letter to a news article, from a short story to a complete novel. Rather than just needing to have something in my writing to help make me stand out, or to protect my ability to write, what we all need is something that proves that consideration was made into what words were used.

What highlighted this issue to me the most — although, to be honest, sniping about A.I. reliably rouses me anyway — was the use of em-dashes. The apparent story regarding these is that, because the ChatGPT program uses em-dashes as its default dash, not distinguishing its use with that of an en-dash or a hyphen, marks it as a red flag. An em-dash is used when you want to make a separate point within a sentence, like I did two sentences ago, but I know I am guilty of not selecting the correct dash while typing, which ironically could save me here.

It makes me wonder if this is acting as a kind of A.I. “watermark”, like imperceptible watermarks that can be added to A.I.-generated images, an irony when A.I. is often used to remove more visible ones. If A.I. doesn’t know when to use the right dash, but consistently uses the same wrong one, is this evidence of a wrong-footed style that acts as a deterrent for people to choose their own words instead? 

Not really, as while Google has created an open-source “SynthID” that records the weighting given to the choice of words by its text-generating programs, something similar is required for every other program that does the same. Until then, self-declaration is the name of the game, suggesting its own questions of motive depending on the answer.

People shouldn’t be left with the words they need to get by, or to have them mean enough for what they need. Playfulness needs to replace the paranoia. All we have our words, which I will need to write in ink.

YOU CAN’T START A FIRE WITHOUT A SPARK [498]

Procrastination is the defining style of my writing, a last-minute culmination of what I have sent too long thinking about. That it does not read this way is more a testament to the craft of writing, the “10% inspiration, 90% perspiration” of committing yourself to completing a cogent work hundreds of times.

Despite this, I would rather my writing not become a race. For example, I was recently asked to write a witness statement for someone completing an apprenticeship course. Once I knew the date for when it was needed, that immediately allowed myself into thinking I need not write anything at all until nearer the time, but I had the time to think of what I needed to include. Meanwhile, I started to worry too much about the small things: how precise in detail did I need to be, and how long did the statement need to be – things that were not specified, but might make a difference to who needed the finished piece.

In the end, the completed statement, delivered on the day before it was needed, was exactly what that person required, and I need not have worried, despite having manoeuvred myself into a position where I did. What was worse, it took only minutes to write, but I gave myself a week of thinking time.

Therefore, I have sought to address this problem, making my writing process more productive. Ironically, I had wanted to conduct this earlier, but the copy I ordered of Robert Boice’s book “Professors as Writers: A Self-Help Guide to Productive Writing” was lost in the post, requiring me to order it again. While geared towards academic writing, the book’s direct approach was recommended to me as an aid to self-discipline – it is not just a matter of turning up earlier, it was what happens once there.

The major draw for me was a “Blocking Questionnaire” devised and standardised by Boice in tests on hundreds of people, its categories used across the book to help you locate the advice you then need. Broken into three sections, you are asked to assess a series of reactions to facing a tough writing assignment, the emotions that creates in yourself, and how you would approach completing it. With procrastination only one possible bock, I was interested if it was my only block, or a symptom of something larger.

Sixty-nine considerations later, the most memorable being “I’ll feel like writing if I do something else first”, and “If I were working efficiently, writing would come more easily, in more finished form”, my “Overall Blocking Mean Score” came to 5.13, just tipping from an indicator of inefficient writing into there being more serious problems, with recurring disruptive blocks. However, the maximum possible score was 10, so I was assured that any identifiable problems would be easier to address.

Categorising my scores revealed a more interesting issue: with little between them, procrastination was ranked joint third with apprehension about the work at hand, with “perfectionism” being a larger factor, and “rules” being largest of all.

What should I take from these results, apart from reading the rest of “Professors as Writers” to address them? I have more insight into what is either causing procrastination, or what it is covering. Based on the answers I gave, the blocks appear to be more emotionally and socially led. I have no problem with writing itself, but how writing makes me feel, and thoughts of how others will react, matter more – then again, they always do.

“Rules” was not an answer I expected, but the rules I put around completing the witness statement shows they do have an effect. I have been setting myself the target of completing a weekly article on various subjects, at five hundred-plus words in length, but that is more a deadline, or obligation, set outside of the act of actually completing it – at least, that is how I think of it, but is the act of setting myself a task triggering the construction of barriers, when all I have to answer to is myself? Time to read the rest of the book...