I’VE GOT FRIDAY ON MY MIND [540]

So, there was me reaching the Friday before the publication date of my next article, and once more having no idea of what to write about, and reaching an often-considered quandary: what comes to mind next that I haven’t already covered? Do I take the week off? Or do I break the emergency glass and write about the mere act of thinking of a subject, thinking this will be a clever way out of a jam?

It was a nice thought at the time, but it never works in practice. Whoever was the first to say that writing is ninety percent perspiration, and ten percent inspiration, either did well to keep themselves anonymous, or the adage itself was effectively crowdsourced.

Aside from having a social-media based trailer ahead of my next piece each week, I use my Friday to say that, yes, you are writing about this, so you must do it now. Oddly enough, the Tim Burton film “Ed Wood” was the inspiration for this, a film producer showing Wood the poster for a film that he will then make, the promises made on the poster of what the film will be like having been used to raise the money required to make it. This practice was used widely by producers like Samuel Z Arkoff and James H Nicholson of American International Pictures, the purveyors of monster horror movies and teenage beach party films – it was where Roger Corman got started, continuing the practice himself.  American International was also among the first film studios to use focus groups to find out what films their prospective audience wanted them to make, but I don’t need to go that far at this stage.

My process upon reaching my Friday deadline, which I now realise is the first of two deadlines I set myself each week, is to engage in a very literal thought process: what stands out in the street? What open tabs do I have on my phone’s web browser? If I clear my mind, what comes to mind first? Having an innate curiosity about the world around me is something I have often deployed to meet a deadline?

You would by now think that I would have a list of possible subjects ready to go, but that would be terribly convenient. I think I have come to realise that, if having a system was helpful, I would have implemented it years ago.

But, to use a film analogy again, my name is above the title. It is not the subject that is central, it is my observation of it. What comes to mind is what makes the right subject that week. It is not the fact, but the thought.

Should I really do this every week? I am making this sound exhausting. It is not like I will wither and die if I don’t do it, and it is not like people won’t go uninformed. This is when you know you are doing this for yourself, and perhaps only yourself. One million views is just the bonus.

IT'S ALMOST THE DEADLINE [539]

The General Strike of 4th to 12th May 1926 was called by the Trade Union Congress (TUC) in sympathy with British coal miners, whose wages and working conditions had eroded and declined in the years after the First World War. The first day saw an estimated 1.5-1.75 million workers on strike, the TUC had restricted participation to key industries: iron and steel, transport, shipping ports, and printing.

However, as “The Times” reported in its edition of 5th May, “The printing industry is at a standstill, but lithographers have not been withdrawn, and compositors in London have not received instructions to strike.”

I have owned a copy of this issue of “The Times” for years, but never properly scrutinised its bizarre appearance. It is a single sheet of foolscap-sized paper (32 x 20 cm) – I have since discovered this edition is known as “Little Sister”, in comparison with the “Big Brother” of the regular broadsheet – printed on both sides in dense typewriter text, the only picture being King’s coat of arms in the paper’s masthead. 

I had seen similar examples of other newspapers printed during the strike in similarly reduced circumstances – there exists rudimentary editions of the “Daily Mirror”, “Daily Mail” and “The Daily Telegraph” – but with “The Times” being Britain’s (unofficial) newspaper of record, with an unbroken print run since 1785, this was the one to have. My copy now resides in a mylar bag, to prevent decomposition of the fragile newsprint paper, a relic of a moment in time.

As “The Times” recently discussed [link], its 5th May 1926 edition was produced and distributed by volunteers and helpers corralled by John Jacob Astor, the then owner of the paper, having already been made aware at a meeting, of newspaper proprietors with the British Government, that its intention was to publish an official Government newspaper to provide both official news and the Government’s viewpoint during the strike, either as a collective effort with the industry, or by itself. This became “The British Gazette”, published by His Majesty’s Stationery Office from the requisitioned premises of “The Morning Post”, using staff from that paper and the “Daily Express”, and edited by the former journalist and current Chancellor of the Exchequer, Winston Churchill.

With printing presses unavailable, six “Multigraph” machines were used to print my copy of “The Times”. These table-top devices, more used by offices for printing direct mail and forms, these involved sliding individual letters, spaces and punctuation onto a cylinder, with motorised versions printed six to seven thousand copies an hour. Haste and inexperience with loading sentences backwards explain many spelling errors, most notably the “WEATHER ORECAST” at the top of the front page, but these were apparently fixed for a second edition the same day, so I now know my copy was from the first edition.

The following days’ editions of “The Times” looked more like the regular paper, printed on its regular presses by an amateur team only just shown how to operate the equipment, but with its page count reduced to one broadsheet folded into four pages. This was partly a result of Churchill requesting newsprint stock for printing “The British Gazette” – originally requesting access to their entire stock for an explicitly Government mouthpiece, “The Times” would only relinquish a quarter of it.

In media terms, the legacy of the General Strike is usually the granting of a Royal Charter to the then-private British Broadcasting Company, having maintained its independent and impartial radio broadcasting during the strike in the face of a threat from Churchill to requisition it for Government use in a manner similar to “The British Gazette”, which still published programme listings for BBC stations like it was a regular paper. The “Little Sister” edition of “The Times” is a further reminder that the UK only ever had state media once, a hundred years ago, for less than two weeks.

The 1926 General Strike ended without agreement, with miners continuing to strike for a further few months. Much later, an industrial dispute over modernising work practices at “The Times” and “The Sunday Times” led to Thomson Newspapers, which bought them from the Astor family in 1966, to suspend production of the papers for nearly a year from December 1978, breaking a near two hundred year print run.

I'VE GOT THE KEY TO ANOTHER WAY [538]

Before leaving for work each morning, I check the app for my local bus company, which holds both my pre-paid ticket and their timetables, to see if my bus has left the station. 

I couldn’t have written that sentence before 2020. A byproduct of the COVID-19 pandemic was the need to tell passengers if they had a chance of getting on a bus. Social distancing guidelines following the initial outbreak restricted the maximum number of passengers on my local buses to a quarter of their original number so, I am guessing, the bus company added a global positioning system to the ticket machine on each bus, telling you how many spaces were left as each bus moved closer to your stop. Would you be lucky? Or would the additionally reduced timetables cause you to wait for longer still? You could always walk to the next stop in the meantime.

With restrictions having lifted, the real-time map and capacity figures have remained in place, meaning I can leave home when I know a bus is coming. That said, I have only a notional idea of when it should have left the station: my local bus company also stopped providing books of printed timetables in 2020, which were always easier to find and read than a PDF on your phone.

However, one day last week, I couldn’t even access the valuable app. I had made the mistake of allowing my phone to update apps automatically, so when I went to use it as normal, I unexpectedly had to log in, which I am rarely asked to do. Putting my password this time around, an on-screen message said it was incorrect. My phone fills in the password automatically, and even after accessing the secure place where it was kept, so I could remind myself of it and type it in manually, I was still being told it was incorrect.

Passwords are a tyranny of modern life. Until my phone sprouted a dedicated directory for my passwords, I used to keep them written down in a safe place – ideally, that is something I should continue to do, if something ever happens to the phone.

I realised that the update to the bus company’s app had also changed the requirements made of a password, which must now have a minimum length of twelve characters, one capital letter, one number, and one non-alphanumeric number. These requirements had already been decried in 2017 by the person that came up with them, who instead preferred less often used combinations of words.

However, the use of human reasoning will still get you nowhere, as I found out in a separate incident. Because I had removed an e-mail address that was previously used to send passcodes to log into another e-mail address – yes, I know – the login screen started to ask me if I could match two symbols to the shadows they would cast if they existed in real life, or match a symbol to that which a small man was standing on in a ring of other symbols. These strange tasks, using inscrutable symbols that looked downright unclear on screen were, apart from being time-consuming, were enough to wrong-foot me, someone who used to only have to tick a box to confirm they were not a robot. I was being made to feel like one, so I wound up attaching my personal e-mail account to an authenticator app, which I sign into using my face, having now failed to separate its use from what I need to sign in for at work.

With phones now able to collect biometric information via face and fingerprint scans, with the intention (and hope) that this information never leaves the device, it is no wonder that passkeys are being touted as the way to go. The UK’s National Cyber Security Centre unambiguously states that passkeys are safer than passwords, and is as safe, or safer than, two-factor identification. I may well have to move to using more passkeys in future, but it does mean I will dread upgrading my phone in future, having encountered problems at work when I did that last time.

With the password for the bus app no longer meeting two of the new criteria, it was never going to work, and I had never received an e-mail ahead of time to inform me of any changes. By this point, I was on the bus, having paid extra because I couldn’t reach my pre-paid ticket. I had also realised there was no way I could reset my password via the app, resorting to the bus company’s website to change it there.

There was no reason for me to write about any of this except to get it out of my system. If there is a takeaway, it is to be more mindful about your apps, and your passwords, until you can get rid of them.

WHO WANTS TO BE A MILLIONAIRE? [537]

I will start with the facts. As of 8.03am BST on Friday 17^th April 2026, this website, www.leighspence.net, has had one million page views since it went live at midday BST on Saturday 1^st May 2021. Thank you for being one of those viewers. I have never added a page counter to this website, as I think people stopped doing that when GeoCities closed in 2009.

This website was originally found at www.dancingwiththegatekeepers.com from 30th May 2016 – yes, I will be doing something to mark a decade since then – and I regret having not used my name from the start. Before the 2021 switch, I had amassed over 185,000 views, but despite the usual promotion on social media, including reposting new links for everything I had done to that point, it took until July 2016 for the new site to achieve one thousand views. 

Fortunately, the momentum reappeared, feelings about starting from scratch being replaced by the safety of having over three hundred articles already available: ten thousand views were reached by September 2021, and twenty-five thousand by the end of the year. Growth was steady, taking until August 2023 to reach one hundred thousand views, but it only took one more year to double that, and only until May 2025 to double that again to four hundred thousand views. 

This means that www.leighspence.net has been visited over six hundred thousand times in the last year...

This is why I am sceptical about page views for websites: it is not from seeing counters on the sites that do have them, or from media reports about other sites, or claims made to attract advertising, but from having seen the data about my own work, for it appears to be thriving to the extent of having taken on a life of its own.

I can only guess that having written about so many different subjects over nearly ten years means that work will appear in search engine results – the main driver of traffic to the website is Google, followed by itself via links from other sites, with social media in third place. Although I will continue to use social media to promote my work, it may be that I am in a good place to survive any eventual decline in the general use of social media, as people move on to other things – it may be a good opportunity to resurrect GeoCities.

I still have my suspicions about A.I. robots scraping my writing, much as anyone who has created anything and put it on the internet will do, despite all the attempts you have made to mitigate or prevent this. However, it this is simply an evolution of how people are searching for information, no matter my misgivings on checking the veracity of what they are being told, then I am glad to be considered a reliable online presence.

The conclusion I should reach from here is accept the figures, instead of being bemused by them, and don’t question why the numbers are so high. I should take it as a sign that I must be doing something right... and if you’ve read this far, I probably have.

Thanks to all of you again.

ALL I NEED IS HELP FOR A LITTLE WHILE [536]

IBM MT/ST

When the spy thriller writer Len Deigthon died in March 2026, his 1970 novel “Bomber”, about a fictional air raid during World War II, was reportedly the first novel to have been written during the word processor. However, Deighton did not use what we would picture to be one: the IBM MT/ST recorded the keystrokes of an IBM Selectric typewriter onto a magnetic tape drive built into a desk, most devices having at least two drives to allow merging sections together, often onto a third drive. The instruction manual advised users to “Think Tape”, like inputting a program. There was no screen, but it could “play back” its output to the typewriter. 

Introduced in 1964, and intended more for composing mail for businesses, IBM withdrew the MT/ST in 1970, as floppy disc drives and terminals with screens became more commonplace. But Deighton’s reason for using the machine was clear: it eliminated the constant retyping of drafts by his assistant, chapters often being revised dozens of times, gaining the ability to edit something that already existed. The tapes are now considered to be lost, but it may be the first time where the record of a novel-in-progress was held on something other than paper.

Over fifty years since the writing of “Bomber”, it appears I still need to reckon with what I should consider to be a permanent record of my work, and where that should be held.

I have two writing projects to which I attach a “permanent record” status: these articles, and a diary. The former exists, save for written notes, as computer files, each one holding the numerous re-edits made during their writing. The latter is a succession of books, written out longhand, and in many cases, especially from 2012-19, ripped out of other books and kept in folders, with some vague intention of copying them up at some point.

Both approaches carry risks, from the lack of backup made of those computer files, to the corruption of data, to paper getting mislaid or removed, or coming into contact with water – only one incident like that will lead you to writing with semi-permanent ink as a minimum for the rest of your life. But should I print out my articles, or type up my diary in future?

The short answer is to embrace the fact that both options require levels of maintenance in order to attach a notion of permanence to them: computer files need to be backed up, ideally to more than one place, and at regular intervals to avoid data loss through file corruption and the lifespan of the devices on which you hold the data; written works can be copied, either by hand, scanning them or typing them up.

Ideally, I should wean myself off pen and ink, leaning more into typing as where the creative work starts, instead of where it ends. Because I essentially come to the screen with something to finish, I am already less perturbed by the flashing cursor on a blank screen than if I started with it. I should make use of that fact.

I WANT A NEW DRUG [535]

I had the hope that, if I visit a store in a foreign country selling DVDs and Blu-rays, I will find something obscure and intriguing. In Belgium, that certainly did happen, but two facts became apparent: no film company is obliged to offer English subtitles if they are not selling to an English-language country, and if you happen across the Brussels branch of HMV, their stock is the same as their UK stores, except labelled as “UK Import”.

Fortunately for me, the French distributor Carlotta Films had released an American film from 1989 that I have only ever heard about, its name promising an interesting journey. “Dr Caligari”, directed by Stephen Sayadian and co-written with Jerry Stahl, is a loose remake of the German Expressionist horror film “The Cabinet of Dr Caligari” (1920), turning it into a surreal, postmodern erotic horror, a descendent of the original doctor conducting chemical experiments to balance out the psychoses of her patients. Capturing the “midnight movie” crowd that loved Sayadian and Stahl’s previous films, the pornographic “Nightdreams” (1981) and “Café Flesh” (1985), “Dr Caligari” disappeared after its theatrical run, save for limited, sporadic releases on home video - this was the first time I had come across a copy I could buy.

The art direction and the acting in “Dr Caligari” are most definitely surreal. The setting is like a more adult version of Tim Burton’s film “Beetlejuice”, but with more vivid colours, geometric shapes and angles, reminding me of Memphis furniture once again. The acting is highly theatrical and choreographed, the result of a four-week rehearsal period: stylised and emphasised poses are held, no-one allowed to just sit or stand naturally, actors are often brought into and out of shots on platforms and turntables, and movement is also simulated by moving backgrounds.

I had wondered if “Dr Caligari”, with its strange performances and themes of fantasy and erotica, with scenes of nudity and gore - a Hollywood writer’s strike during the film’s production meant its sub-$200,000 budget could stretch to special effects artists and actors that wouldn’t have otherwise been available - was deliberately made to appeal to an audience that wanted to see something wild and screwed up. I think you can consider it to be a surreal work, thought it might be up to the viewer as to whether the “s” should be capitalised – the art direction is not a gloss on a standard Hollywood script, there is symbolic use of wounds, tongues and televisions, and there is a sense of this film working within its own reality, while also commenting on how our reality “fixes” people.

Even if so, the film is so identifiably a work by Stephen Sayadian, also its production designer and art director, record as saying it needed to attract the “midnight movie” crowd to be a success. In his work as a creative director for “Hustler” magazine, in charge of advertising, the editor of the satirical magazine “Slam”, the films “Nightdreams” and “Café Flesh”, the video for Wall of Voodoo’s version of the Beach Boys song “Do It Again”, and “Jackie Charge”, a “midnight movie” style play – all of which were either written or co-written with Jerry Stahl, who would also write scripts for TV shows as disparate as “ALF” and “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation”, reveal similarities in performance and production design. Sayadian has also said it made sense to hire himself as production designer on “Dr Caligari”, as hiring anyone else would have taken up a substantial fraction of the overall budget. “Dr Caligari” director of photography Ladi von Jansky also shot print advertisements with Sayadian, informing further the held poses and stylised motion.

I was happy to see a film that was unlike most I have seen, but if I wish to look up the remainder of Stephen Sadayian’s catalogue, I will need to remember that the even-more-adult “Nightdreams” and “Café Flesh” were released under the pseudonym “Rinse Dream”.

DIES IRAE, DIES ILLA [534]

"The Temptation of St Anthony"

Once I was finally able to stand in front of the triptychs by Hieronymus Bosch that I was fortunate to see in Belgium, I came to realise that the level of detail in them was overwhelming. That said, I spent most of that trip with aching legs and feet from all the walking, every gallery visit being punctuated by finding opportunities to sit down for a bit, so the whole trip had its overwhelming moments.

I should have known all of this ahead of time. Having heard the term “triptych” more when talking about groups of large canvasses by Francis Bacon, what I am seeing here are altar pieces, cabinets made to be opened for the benefit of a single person, or small group of people, a level of intimacy wrecked by displaying them permanently open behind a wall of glass. I only realised once back home that another painting was on the outer panels of “The Last Judgement” on display at the Groeningemuseum in Bruges, known as “Christ Crowned with Thorns”.

But the details... a hump-backed bird, with Goofy-like dog ears and wooden skis, carrying a letter on its beak wearing a red robe a hat comprising a funnel with a branch coming out of it, a bauble hanging from a branch (“The Temptation of St. Anthony”); a being comprised of a human head with legs coming from its metal shell, an arm coming out of the top holding a sword (“The Last Judgement”); a monk-like figure with a large head and no arms walks with a frame on wheels, an antenna coming out of their head (“The Temptation of St. Anthony”); a hooded blacksmith about to bring their hammer on a naked body slumped over their anvil (“The Last Judgement”).

Detail from "The Last Judgement"

No amount of description, and no amount of choice, will ever do justice describing the sheer... amount of imagery there is. Looking through Stefan Fischer’s book of the complete works of Bosch, as published by Taschen, the many pages that zoom in on detail, for example printing the dog-bird larger than it is in the painting, would make you think Bosch completed hundreds of paintings, despite only 25-30 works attributed to him or his atelier still being extant. The examination of his work, and the endless reproduction of it – of course we could have bought figurines of details from Bosch works in the gallery shops after seeing the real thing – truly makes every frame a painting.

I initially had the impression of the imagery of the hellscapes depicted in these altar pieces being an extension of the medieval doodles made in monastery documents by scribes, known as “marginalia” or “drolleries”, all strange creatures and people with trumpets coming out of their behinds. As much as I mentioned Bosch’s “personal inventiveness of his surreal imagery” last time, and wondering if there is a similar building of symbolism as would be found at the Magritte Museum, next door to “The Temptation of St. Anthony”,  bigger indicator was its subsequent influence, as indicated by Jan Provoost’s own “Last Judgement” featuring similar hellish imagery in one corner only a decade after Bosch’s death, and in the composition of more realist works by Pieter Bruegel the Elder.

The presence of this imagery helps to decentralise the subject of each painting overall – Jesus is pushed to the top of “The Last Judgement”, and St. Anthony is to the right in his depiction, their depictions no longer than other elements in each work. You are forced to look everywhere, from left to right, from up to down, taking in the whole, zeroing in on detail, then considering the external artwork. The hellish imagery could indicate an inevitability of evil, or even its ultimate triumph, but having hundreds of years to get used to seeing such imagery, reproduced in any form, could indicate its inevitable slide into banality.

The most famous of all Bosch works is “The Garden of Earthly Delights”, which I have not mentioned only because I did not see it on my trip – it is found in Madrid, Spain, or across numerous gift items at the Groeningemuseum, when I was expecting them to have a “Last Judgement” notebook at the very least.

Detail from "The Temptation of St Anthony"