27.10.00 : between speaking and writing

Friday 27th October

I think email comes from the worrying place between speaking and writing. It insinuates the impulse to make things up - which is expressed in writing - into conversation, where the impulse is to speak without artifice - usually for want of time to think and out of fear of discovery. How different might it be if each message carried its start and finish time, so that it was evident to you that my telephonic 'Hi, just digging over the courgette patch wondering how you are' had taken 25 minutes to compose - that it belonged to literature, when it seemed to issue from the Denmark of laptop conversation. There is nothing new in this of course, except the deceptiveness of its source.

Stinking hot day here; ants in the bread bin.

Kevin