600

 This is my 600th  blog. In sheer tonnage of prose, that's about ten novels worth, not including the other blogs I started and lost or abandoned. It's the raw, untreated sewage of my life gushing forth in torrents. I don't need an editor, I need Sir Joseph Bazalgette. 

It ficus...

I deserve a break. I type with one finger and it's rusted to the knuckle. Luckily, I don't have to do this any more. We have AI now. AI, our flexible friend. What can't it do? Well, it routinely fails to take out the bins or pick up the hoover, and I'd be starving if I waited for it to make me a sandwich. But its great at impressions. It's a regular Les Dennis. It would have killed on "Copycats". 

A while ago some tech savvy friends tricked me. They got AI to write an essay in "my style", and in my voice (I have done many, many podcasts). They played it to me, and sat around eagerly waiting for the penny to drop. It didn't. I had no idea whose voice it was, and why I was having to listen to this drivel. The text was vague, unfocused and unfunny in a way that mistook whimsy for wit. The voice was a neutral southern standard British English one, not a tautology, and with a slight whistle. It was like my voice on a slab. I'd been vocally exsanguinated. There was nothing to it. I'd say it was the ghost of my voice but ghosts tend to have a bit more dynamic range, even if it's just a litany of complaints. How useless are ghosts? Never spilling the tea on the sundered veil, just going on about the hat picture or their feet. Timewasters. 

But that was a few years ago and we're always told tech is improving exponentially. The singularity's right round the corner. So when my mate Dave told me he'd asked AI to do a blog in my style, I was intrigued. I've long suspected Urban Fantasy novelists just prompt their endless book series into existence. If this thing had successfully adopted my style, I could put my feet up and let Deep Thought blart out JPH books by the ton. A follow up to Fine, where Paul auto-asphyxiates in his garage and his body is discovered by his first girlfriend and his P.E. teacher from school. Or a series of horror short stories that no one likes, but at least I didn't have to spend months on them. Or any number of body part books: JPH's "Spleen", JPH's "Cuticles", JPH's "Eustachian Tube". His bum. This could be a real money spinner. Or a real "good exposure" spinner, at least. Good exposure - the artist's crypto currency. 

So, I read it. Here it is. I can't get the dark background off it. Sorry. 

Well, the title's a good start. That's my voice alright. Pow! You got me. 

The Existential Dread of the Common Houseplant, and Other Tragedies

There is a sort of quiet, desperate dignity in a houseplant, isn't there? A Ficus, maybe. It sits on a windowsill, performing the slow, silent ballet of photosynthesis, entirely dependent on a capricious god who sometimes remembers to water it on a Tuesday, and sometimes forgets for a fortnight. The plant just... endures. It’s tragic, really. And in that quiet endurance, I find a certain kind of bleak comedy, the sort of thing that makes you want to laugh and cry all at once. Life is like that. It's funny and terrible and ridiculous all the time.

My own Ficus, which I have named 'Finis' – for, you know, the Latin for 'an end', and also because I am a witty man not entirely without artifice – is currently looking a bit peaky. A bit yellow around the edges. A bit like me on a Sunday morning, before the life-giving properties of strong coffee and a full English breakfast have been administered.

You see, Finis and I, we're stuck in a bit of a rut. An existential rut. I'm trying to write, to fashion viable tragedy from the quietness of life, but the words, they're like trying to herd particularly stubborn, wet cats. They slip through your fingers, leaving a trail of damp indifference. I sit at my desk, the glow of the screen a cold comfort, and Finis just sits there, judging me with its silent, botanical disapproval. Or maybe that's just my own self-loathing projected onto an inanimate object. Probably the latter.

I was on Facebook the other day, always a mistake, when I saw a post from someone wondering what the gravel-voiced blues groaner Tom Waits smelled like. Most people said 'cigarettes', which is probably true but boring. I, however, wondered if he smelled of old books and regret, which I thought was a nice turn of phrase. I like to think my prose glimmers, even when I'm just mucking about on social media.

My new memoir, which will hopefully be published soon, opens with me dragging my hungover self to a physiotherapist appointment, thus launching into a wildly digressive tale of geriatric Pilates, car troubles, and an abandoned bottle of urine I found in the back of my car. It's full of frustrations, humiliations, and heartache, but I've discovered you can say important things with jokes, and the audiences always understand that.

So, I sit here with my wilting Ficus, confronting mortality and my creative inertia. The karma around my flat is thick enough to need an aqualung to breathe. But, as a wise man once said, you've got to find the humour in the wreckage. Or perhaps that was just a customer review of my novel.

In any case, Finis and I, we will endure. I will give him some water.

And I will keep writing, one sharp, witty, and deeply human sentence at a time.

Now. 

It is interesting. How could it not be, to me at any rate. The first paragraph is so unlike me I was genuinely confused. It's like one of those posh-blokes-living-in-North-London essays they have in the Guardian Guide. Or a possibly a rambling, and they're all rambling, New Yorker piece. The sympathy for a pot plant, a ficus named "Finis" (because Latin), is the sort of relatable commercial idea I'd never have. There is a plant in my office, properly a tree. I don't know what it is, I haven't given it a name. I just ask it to blow oxygen at my face while I write about adverts I've seen on the telly. Those opening paragraphs would sell. They're over-written and I do recognise some of my awkward punctuation. (Oh, sure, that's the bit your going to show me, AI. Cheers) It's a bit generic. The stuff about me not being able function without strong coffee and a full English breakfast is boringly bland. Ted Bovis would tell tell you comedy is all about specifics. First rule of comedy. 

The paragraph about the "existential rut" is close. It's like a first draft of something I'd do. Stuff you'd block in, intending to polish later on. And the "Probably the latter", capper is very me. I won't be doing that again. 

Then it gets very strange, quoting gobbets of things I actually said, not on blogs, but on Facebook, presenting them as "something I read". There's that jarring "old books and regret" line, which I think someone else wrote, and which I recognise as "a nice turn of phrase", and add that my prose "glimmers". AI thinks I'm a self-regarding twat! Then it wallops straight into a direct lift from my blog about writing Spine, adding a weird bit about a bottle of urine in the back of my car. I have no car and even if I did it wouldn't be the place I'd stash my urine. I'm not a savage. Then there are semi-quotations, again, and a bit where I'm blithely confident of what my audience understands. These are stolen, context free, from various interviews I've done. It's casting a wide net. 

The bit about the aqualung is just odd. It's a direct quote from the film The Phantom of the Paradise. I wrote a review of it once and used that quote. AI's trawler's net can't tell the difference between me and the rock singer Beef from that film. Finally. A compliment. 

"As a wise man once said". So me. Just my hokey old style. You got me. The pub bore. And what a pay off: "I'll keep writing one sharp, witty, and deeply human sentence at a time." I mean, as a sentence it reeks. How can you not write your sentences one at a time? I'm not Rick Wakeman, I don't have six keyboards on the go. 

Am I sharp, witty and deeply human? And do I have to be all of them in one sentence? Bunched up like a stalled conga, like The Nutty Boys. I can be sharp. I can be witty. But deeply human? Do I sit back after purling off a freshly knapped zinger and think, "That is so human. And not just human at sea level. It's some kind of subterranean humanity, a phrase only a troglodyte or Morlock could have penned. Only sappers, Cornish tin miners and proponents of hollow earth theory could come close to the depth of my humanity. It's a chthonic boom boom. " 

I would never write this, could never write this, because a) its shit and b) I had a Catholic mother, whose watch words were "self praise is no praise", a quietly demoralising lesson out of keeping with these "fake it till you make it" times. I might refer to myself as witty - The New York Review of Books certainly would - and like to think that what I write is sharp. But it is not for me to call my writing deeply human, and the idea of a machine pretending to be me describing its writing as deeply human is deeply creepy. Why not just rip off my face and wear it as a mask, Roboboy. If you don't oil your right knee,  you'll get the walk straight away. 

I may not do another 600 of these. But I think the job of JPH is safe for now. Ghosts, in the machine, need not apply.