Sex and Drugs and Chinese Rolls

I’m in Hong Kong reading FT Weekend eating a Chinese spring roll (bit of
a conundrum, but in the end I went all eclectic and opted for the brown sauce).

I got a lift to the airport from Andrew who is working on a project for a pharma company so his car was full of OTC medicines. Sex at 35,000 ft? Unfortunately not, although I did manage to find a very fine film on the plane called Sex Drive.

The last week was fun. Eight talks across Wales on weathering the economic storm. What a fantastic country. I even bought a CD of Welsh male voice choir music, which I played whilst driving through Snowdonia. Talk about stirring the soul. My mental Magi Mix was on high speed with thoughts whipping around my ears at great speed.

One thing that occurred to me half way up a Welsh mountain was that I’m not very found of new things. This is pretty ironic for a so-called futurist but there you go. I far prefer things that are old. Things that have been there, done that and come back clutching a T-shirt. Why could this be so? I think it is because old things, especially things that have been made by the hand of man, somehow put things into context. They remind us that we are nothing. Or at least they put the brakes on any grandiose thoughts we have about our own self-importance.

Twitter? Give me a break. In the grand scheme of things this idea is not even a punctuation mark. I suspect that even the internet may turn out to be no more than a glorified new motorway system. Things will move faster than ever before and we will undoubtedly be able to do many things that were once impossible but, when more has been said than done, the basics won’t have changed very much.

By the way, buy the first issue of Wired magazine (UK edition). It’s quite interesting, although quite how I became an “expert” is quite beyond me. Maybe if you hang out somewhere for long enough people just think that you belong.

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