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.