Somewhat close to a joke isn’t it. You say to someone you know, do you know the time, and they say yes. And then they look at their watch. You can sort of challenge them well, did you really know the time when you said yes? They’ll say “yeah, I knew how to get the time” and I think that’s often what we do mean when we say yes, we know things, we know how to get them from our long term memory, from some reliable environmental resource, from wherever. The artist’s sketch pad is kind of more interesting I …

Somewhere, possibly in Cinnamon Streets, Bruno Schulz writes of the silvery imprint of the footsteps of angels. A couple of nights ago, I was sitting at home after a long dinner and nice wine, watching the lights on my wireless router flickering as people sent me things. The impersonality of the transport of stuff online still frustrates me as strongly as it did years ago. Indications of passage, but absence of presence. Of course there is now a much wider range of social media applications — Instant Messaging, the blogosphere — than when I was first writing about this, but …