With A Little Help From My Tech

          The other evening, while walking home alone from a meeting, I inadvertently activated the voice recorder on the phone in my pocket. During the journey of about fifteen minutes, I had started to sing, loudly and heartily, as if to an imagined audience, an old favourite from my folk-club days, Cyril Tawney’s Sally Free and Easy. Mind you, I wasn’t just indulging in the joy of unrestrained vocal expression (fortified by the two pints of porter consumed in the pub after the meeting); I was consciously practising, or rehearsing so that, in the admittedly unlikely event of my being called upon to perform a party piece (the festive season approaches), I should have something acceptable to offer. I thought, at the time, that I had pretty much nailed it but when, the next day, I discovered and listened to the soundtrack, my bubble was burst. Even the muffled, distorted background, could not disguise the fact that I have work to do on hitting the notes (in the coda, particularly) and on mastering the lyrical phrasing (which came across as a bit ragged). Technology sometimes sneaks up behind us.

          I deleted the file, but not before skimming through the latter hour-and-a-half, which comprised sounds of my arriving home, helping myself to supper and watching Car Rescue until my Other Half enters the room and ‘suggests’ a change of channel – all of which was also disappointing, in so far as it highlighted just how many hours of our lives slip away in the mundanity of routine existence. Surely this is what Alfred Hitchcock was referring to when he defined “drama” as “life, with the boring bits left out.”

         There are some mornings – yesterday, for example – when I wake up feeling less than on the ball. “Groggy” would be an apt description. There are ways to haul oneself out of this state of mental sluggishness – cold water in the face is one – but why they occur in the first place and so randomly is a mystery to me. Yesterday’s grogginess lasted most of the day, despite my applying fresh air, physical exercise, caffeine, a shave and even a haircut.

          When, at last, I did feel sufficiently alert, I tackled some of my administrative backlog and followed up a few of my miscellaneous notes, one of which was to look up the word, ‘lachanaphobia’. (I know, some of you may be thinking there are more productive ways to spend five minutes, but bear with me.) According to my AI app, it means “an irrational fear of vegetables”, so while I was at it, I asked whether there is such a thing as an irrational fear of salads (having been lately in several Airbnb flats where there is every imaginable piece of culinary equipment except for salad bowls and servers) and it answered, “Yes. The word is deipnophobia”. Whilst I would never dispute the irrationality of these or any other phobia, I do question why there is a vocabulary dedicated to their description; I mean, you could just use “irrational fear of (whatever)” and not have to remember all the Greek prefixes. Still, if you’re a clinical psychologist, I guess the use of ‘scientific’ terminology to explain human irrationality lends a degree of credibility and gravitas to your diagnoses.

          AI assistants are useful, but they do have a sinister side to them. Today, when I opened mine up to ask it something, it was already displaying the answer to a question I had not put, but which was relevant nonetheless: “How do you shake off morning grogginess?” By way of answer, it listed all the remedies already known to me (except the haircut). Can it somehow sense when I’m being slow-witted?

          And can you blame me for feeling somewhat monitored this week? If I wasn’t feeling paranoid, I would be tempted to have another go at rendering Sally Free and Easy, loudly, heartily and publicly.