The not so secret life of things.

Like most small children I was cruel to many of the other non-human inhabitants of the planet. Not to cuddly mammals such as dogs and cats, but to insects, particularly woodlice. In the West Country we called them grampuses and I would while away idle moments in the garden picking off the scales of the still living creatures. Now that I’ve reached the age when I realise my own life’s a gift that will soon be taken away, I’m increasingly reluctant to kill any living creature, even rather unpleasant ones such as scorpions, slugs and Tories. 

   But until recently objects were a different matter. Being inanimate one could treat them in the same way an eighteenth  century planter would his slave, or  one of Margaret Atwood’s Commanders would his Handmaid. They had no minds of their own, they were simply there to serve. Recently, however, they’ve begun to fight back. At first it was a simple matter: freshly-washed objects would suddenly slide off the draining-board back in to the sink, others would suddenly slither from your fingers and crash, suicidally, onto the floor. Now you may explain this by, in the case of my first example, the slight earth-tremors to which central Italy is subject, and, in the case of my second, to the general dodderiness of the over-sixties. But how about this, smartypants?

   For some years we’ve owned one of these all-in-one coffee machine. You simply press a button to tell the machine what size of coffee you want. It then proceeds to grind the beans, pre-infuse them, and finally, having discharged the grounds into a removable container,  deliver the drink to your cup complete with a thick crema. At each stage a message appears on a small screen telling you how far the process has gone. When the machine arrived, the messages were in Italian, but it was possible to change the language to English, which we did. Admittedly a slightly odd English. When the container holding the grounds needed emptying we got the message ‘Dreg drawer full’. I imagined Dreg Drawer as a slightly over-the-hill Australian porn star clutching a protruding belly, in his younger days the star of the ‘adult movie’ Skin-flick at Hanging Cock. Then suddenly this week the messages changed. Dreg Drawer had disappeared to be replaced by the much more respectable ‘Empty coffee grounds’. That was fine. Unfortunately ‘One small coffee’ now read ‘Single shot’. Now I’ve nothing against American English in its proper place i.e. the mouth of an American. But to find my coffee machine addressing me in a transatlantic dialect over breakfast was a step too far. I consulted the manual and set about re-programming the machine’s language. Being familiar with the Americans’ proprietorial attitude to the language we invented, I expected to find, in addition to the Italian, English, Spanish , French and German alternatives something labelled UK English. No, there was just English, an English which had started as the Australian variant, changed briefly to standard English and, having finally ended up in Central Perks with the cast of Friends, decided to stick with American English. I’ve re-programmed the machine’s language to Italian.

  So how does one explain the machine’s linguistic evolution? I guess a scientist might say that all matter is inherently unstable, that protons and neutrons don’t have to behave the way they do inside the atom, they merely do so the vast majority of the time. Alternatively, one can take the Wordsworthian view that there’s: 

                                            ‘  … something far more deeply interfused,

                                                Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,

                                                And the round ocean, and the living air,

                                                And the blue sky, and in the mind of man,            

                                                A motion and a spirit, that impels

                                                All thinking things, all objects of all thought,

                                                And rolls through all things.’

I hope it’s wrong. Not only could I no longer be cruel to grampuses but I’d have to be respectful and considerate to the furniture, the cutlery and all the myriad dumb objects on which I rely for my daily well-being, or risk being pilloried in the Guardian for anima-centric insensitivity  - or even have bricks thrown through my window by the lunatic fringe of the Things’ Rights Society.