Cross-country Skiing in Finland

A few days ago we returned from a one-week trip to Äkäslompolo in Finnish Lapland, where we did some cross-country skiing. I thought I’d write a post about my experiences as a novice skier.

First I had to hire the equipment (skis, boots and sticks) which cost about £100 for a week. The boots, similar in weight to walking boots, clip onto the skis at the toe and pivot there, allowing you to lift the heel. The sticks have straps that attach them to your gloved hand. My skis had a half-metre-long felt strip (or skin) on the underside, in the middle section. This skin creates friction (traction) so that you can push forwards. Cross-country skis curve upwards. If you lay them flat on a level floor you’ll see a gap between the mid-point of the ski and the floor. If you stand with your weight on both skis they flatten, but not enough for the skins to make contact with the ground, so the skins don’t stop you gliding. However putting all your weight onto one ski presses the skin into the ground, which creates enough friction for you to kick off from that ski. Skis vary, of course, and some employ other types of frictional surfaces to do the same job. I wore a wicking merino base layer, a fleece, a lightweight waterproof jacket, and the same showerproof trousers I use for hiking in the UK. If anything I felt too hot, even in temperatures of -5 C. I could easily have removed the fleece while skiing. You also need a hat and gloves. If you want to fit in with the locals you wear a beanie-style hat. I had a trapper-style one with ear flaps that I bought years ago.

Waymarked ski trails fan out from Äkäslompolo, created and maintained by some means I never observed. These trails consist of two skiing tracks a few metres apart, one track for each direction of travel. You use the track on the right just as, in Finland, you drive on the right. The tracks resemble miniature railway lines, except that they have two grooves rather than two rails. Faster skiers coming up behind you are supposed to leave the track and ski around you. You don’t need to step aside for them. In some places, for example at trail intersections, the tracks disappear or become indistinct. I suspect the same applies on the more demanding upland trails, though I’ve no direct experience. The village of Äkäslompolo sits beside a lake of the same name. (In Finnish, lompolo means a small lake.) In March, three-quarters of a metre of ice and a further half-metre of snow cover the lake. A trail across a frozen lake such as this, with no ups and downs, makes a good practice ground for the novice.

Cross-country skiing looks deceptively easy on videos, or when you watch the natives who likely started as children. However when you first stand on the track you sense an unnerving lack of friction under your skis. If you shift a little from equilibrium you fall over. The skis slip forwards or backwards, or you topple sideways because the grooves make it tricky to step to one side to restore equilibrium. And you may find it hard to get back up again after a fall. The skis clash with each other, slide across the ground, and so on. Having sticks strapped to your hands doesn’t help. To get up on your own you need to start with the skis parallel and across any slope, but you may still have to unstrap the sticks and detach the skis if all else fails. As you gain confidence you can begin to shuffle forwards with alternate legs and with the help of the sticks, like walking with trekking poles. With yet more confidence you can proceed more vigorously, kicking hard on the skis alternately, and gliding after each kick. Or you can keep your legs together, propelling yourself forwards using the sticks alone. More advanced skiers often ski freestyle, as opposed to the classic style described above. Freestyle looks more like skating and doesn’t make use of the grooves. Away from the lake you will, of course, encounter gradients. When descending a slope you squat down to lower your centre of gravity and hold your sticks horizontally under your arms as you glide. You need to remain still, relaxed and in the zone until you come to a halt. When I first did this my feet juddered back and forth as I slid, and I soon fell. A passing Finnish woman told me (in English) to relax. (Good advice, but easier said than done.) You may well lose your nerve at first on the longer steeper slopes, and feel you have to fall in order to stop. You see skiers towed by dogs. (What could possibly go wrong?) You see skiers with babies in pouches on their backs. (Yikes.) More experienced skiers often descend slopes without squatting, but I had an uncomfortable experience falling backwards from a standing position. My feet, pinned to the skis at the toe, had no choice but to remain horizontal as I fell. So when my lower legs also fell into a near horizontal position my ankles ended up like those of a ballerina en pointe. On the other hand, if you fall backwards from a squat you have a more comfortable angle between your feet and lower legs as you fall. Also you don’t have as far to fall. In several places near Äkäslompolo the trails pass over hump-backed bridges, where the tracks disappear. At one such place the trail curved to the left beyond the bridge. I pushed off from the bridge-hump and glided down but, having no way to steer to the left in the absence of tracks, I carried straight on, shooting off the trail and into a wooden signpost. The post stopped one leg but the other slid on, producing an uncomfortable stretch in the groin. Had I done any more skiing on subsequent days I’d have tried to learn the technique for turning in situations like that.

So what about going uphill? You can classic-ski up a slight gradient, but to ascend a steeper gradient you need to step out of the tracks. You angle your skis outwards, dig the inner edges into the snow and walk up, creating a herringbone pattern on the snow. You’ll likely slide back at first while attempting this, so you need to keep your sticks pointing backwards and downwards behind you, in order to halt any such slips. More experienced skiers ski up steep hills using the freestyle I mentioned earlier.

So there you have it, the limited take of a novice with two days’ experience and a paltry 14 km under his belt. I can see the attraction of cross-country skiing. You cover a lot of ground in a short time compared to walking, and the faster sections feel exhilarating. I gave it up after two days because every part of my body ached or hurt. I needed time to recover and also wondered about the risk of more severe injury. I wanted to move at a brisk pace rather than just shuffle along, so I knew I’d have to fall many more times.

Murder Is No Crime!

I recently asked ChatGPT to generate an image for a blog post. The post talked about the time when our car’s catalytic converter was sawn off during the night. (The precious metals contained therein have a high scrap value.) Generate an image of petty criminals sawing off a catalytic converter, I said. I can’t generate images of criminal activity, came the reply. This was annoying because I suspected that if I’d simply asked it to generate an image of a man sawing off a catalytic converter it would have complied. After all, it had happily given me an image of a man smashing the window of a house. In other words I could have got what I wanted merely by omitting the word criminal. Of course I did then repeat the request, omitting the word criminal, but the AI still wouldn’t cooperate. I imagine it had remembered my previous request and wasn’t going to let me get around it that easily. The following day I asked it to generate an image for a post about murder mysteries. It complied without demur and even gave me some spooky bats, gothic gloom, and a knife. Well, I don’t know where to begin in writing about this madness, because the last time I looked murder was a crime attracting a harsher punishment than the stealing of car components.

Come over here Poirot. Take a look at this semen stain. Murder and blood are wholesome family entertainment. Semen, not so much. Yet even if we had parity between the two body fluids, that would still be unfair to semen, given how nasty it is to stick a knife into somebody. This is a fundamental problem with ChatGPT. It is trained on the unreflective mindset of the herd. When I say unreflective I don’t necessarily mean unintelligent. I mean incurious, conventional, not interested in rocking the boat. Even the highest-flying tech-wizard can be unreflective in this way. In fact she or he is rather likely to be. This mindset puts on a stern face when it disapproves, and you’re supposed to be cowed by that. How easy it is for this type of person to chastise us with that stern face and wagging finger. That’s inappropriate, they say, setting their virtual or real face to school ma’am mode. How I hate that word.

AI Lucid Dream

This topic came to me after I’d played around a bit with ChatGPT’s image-related features. I gave it a photo taken in the village where I live in Sussex, and told it to write a 100-word description of it. It produced the following.

The photo captures a quiet suburban or rural road during what appears to be early spring. The road curves gently to the right, flanked by lush greenery and a variety of flowering trees showing off shades of pink and white blossoms. There are well-manicured bushes and a collection of yellow daffodils bordering a small gravel area in the foreground. The sky is overcast, suggesting a cool, perhaps damp atmosphere. A large house with a reddish-brown roof is visible in the distance, alongside a red-brick house with a dark roof. The scene is peaceful, with no people or vehicles in sight, evoking a serene residential vibe.

Then I asked ChatGPT to generate an image based on the above description. In other words I fed its output back into its input, which it didn’t seem to mind. In fact it obliged me by producing the first of the images you see below. This image features elements from the description, yet it looks quite different from the photo. (Trust me on that. I don’t want to spoil the look of this post by uploading a poor photo.) Would the AI have produced an image closer to the original photo if I’d asked for a longer description? I doubt it. I’ve found it difficult to direct AI image generation with any precision. Sure, you can push it in the right direction, but it does tend to go its own way on the finer points. Repeating the process with other photos, I began to sense a dreamlike quality in their AI counterparts. The AI images combined features from the photos with eerie additions and modifications. In a dream you often know where you are, even though nothing looks as it should. You just know. The same applies with these photos, since I know where I took them. I use the word lucid in my post title because in a lucid dream you recognise your dream as a dream, just as I know that my images are just images.

In this first scene (described above) I’m wandering along a road about 300 metres from my house. This dream road doesn’t have the vibe of my neighbourhood, yet I understand how it came about. In the image we see a prosperous suburban or semi-rural area, with large houses and manicured verges. Many such places exist in the UK, in other parts of Sussex and in counties like Surrey and Cheshire. The dream road has no pavement, so I’d have to dream-walk in the gutter. You must dream-drive here, rather than go on foot. The trees resemble ones I’ve often seen on dinner plates.

To get to this dream pub you’d carry on down the preceding dream road and turn right after half a kilometre. It looks much like the pub of waking life, but more gemütlich. ChatGPT does a better job of recreating a photo if the photo has only one main element (as in this case). The ChatGPT photo description doesn’t provide enough information to place multiple elements correctly. In any case the AI tends to disobey, or garble, precise stage directions. This pub has a dim interior, in contrast to the overlit one of waking life with its garish sports screens. The AI has turned the St George’s flag through ninety degrees. It amuses me to think of this as a disrespectful transformation.

This ancient half-timbered house has grown bigger in my dream, with walls now straight enough to please a surveyor. It reminds me of Suzi Quatro’s story about when her father travelled from the USA to England to visit her. On arrival, she showed him around the Tudor mansion she’d bought. I don’t want to worry you, he whispered with genuine concern, but the walls are crooked. The AI has moved the lichen-covered stones from the churchyard and planted them in the greensward opposite the house.

Of all the images, this one feels closest to my waking life (despite having several components). Locals call this open area Tanyard Field. Nearby Pinchnose Green recalls the pungent smell of tanning that once pervaded the area. The houses’ sizes, colours and placement are pretty much as they should be. I’d feel reassured in my dream at this point.

I turn into the lane leading back to the High Street and see the familiar barriers and cones left by the gas-pipe men. But this dream lane looks like a residential side street in a sizeable town rather than a Sussex village. The AI has pinched the Union flag from a private social club at the far end and hung it above the road.

This dream High Street confirms the urban impression. The real village High Street often has a busy feel, but it doesn’t have these tall buildings.

I always stop and peer through the window of this antique shop. In this dream version we see four-storey buildings opposite, housing other antique shops. This could be Edinburgh. And why not, in a dream?

Ah yes, the garage at the south end of the High Street, where I sometimes buy my newspapers. In contrast to the typically English shopping thoroughfare, it has a Hopperesque quality.

Finally I’ve reached the home straight: the road where I live. Yet it resembles somewhere up north. Lancashire or Yorkshire, I’d say. My dream has retained the parked Audi, a familiar object on the road, along with the daffodils. Seeing as I’d need to walk up a non-existent alleyway on the left to get back home, I assume my house no longer exists. I panic and wake up.

ChatGPT Re-imagines My Life

This post is based on one I uploaded a couple of years ago, a true story about something that happened to me in 1972 on the island of Anglesey, off the northwest coast of Wales. I’ve fed that story into ChatGPT, paragraph by paragraph, and asked it to generate images to fit the words. So in this post we see how AI imagines the events unfolding. The only other instruction I gave was that the images should be in woodcut style and landscape format (16:9).

My parents and another couple used to rent a cottage on Anglesey for a week during the summer. And one year I had nothing else going on during my vacation from uni, so they invited me to join them for a few days. This arrangement might not have appealed to many young men but I was easygoing and amenable, and I thought Why not?

The cottage wasn’t right on the edge of a cliff like that. It was in the small village of Moelfre, surrounded by other cottages. But the AI isn’t a mind-reader, so it wouldn’t know that. The scenery is pretty accurate for Anglesey, but the domestic architecture is a bit off. The cottage appears to be constructed out of weird green blocks. There were only five of us, by the way, so the AI has added an extra person. Maybe it thinks I brought my girlfriend along, which I didn’t. My parents and their friends were older than the people in the image. This is like the generational compression you see in TV dramas and soaps.

I’ll digress from the main embarrassment now and deal with a subsidiary embarrassment. It concerns how I sometimes used to say careless things at that age, in contrast to my extreme carefulness now. One evening in the cottage the conversation turned to income tax. My parents’ male friend said how much he resented the amount he had to pay. I replied that the money wasn’t really his in the first place because he benefited from all the services that the tax paid for. He only thought that the money was his because it was nominally part of his wages. In fact it would be better if he never saw it on his wage slip, so that he never got that false impression.

This is where it gets weird. There’s a continuity problem, as they say in the film industry. Perhaps you need to tell the AI to take the previous bit of the story into account, since it obviously doesn’t do that automatically. And suddenly we have three extra people, eight in total, dressed in a turn-of-the-twentieth-century fashion. (I think this is a consequence of asking for a woodcut-style image.) I assume the rather fierce-looking elderly gentleman is my parents’ friend, the one who shouldn’t begrudge paying his taxes according to my youthful self in knee-breeches. Maybe the three extras have gathered with popcorn to witness the explosion, this being the only excitement they had on Anglesey in those days. The scene has the same vibe as Oliver Twist asking for more or the When did you last see your father? painting.

Lol the cheek of it, coming from a student who had scarcely done a day’s work in his life, lived off a grant from the taxpayers, and had contributed nothing financial to this holiday! I wasn’t stroppy, difficult or impolite then, but I did have some blind spots. I doubt I’d say that to an ordinary working man now although, of course, my words had a grain of truth in them. The individual functions and exists within an organic whole. The lung cell cannot keep all the air it breathes for its own use, and still survive as a lung cell.

So now I’m truly in the doghouse after that outburst, and the scene has shifted clothes-wise about a hundred years forward. I’ve kept my tousled hair though, and we’ve gone back to having six in the cottage. My virtual girlfriend has deserted me and is sitting with the grownups who, as I said before, don’t look grown up enough. I appear to have lectured them on the lung cell analogy using a chart I’ve pinned to the wall. I bet they appreciated that.

Anyway, I’ll return now to the main point of embarrassment. My parents’ friends had the car and a superior knowledge of Anglesey, so one day they suggested a trip to Church Bay on the northwest coast of the island. We arrived at this place and my parents and the other couple set up their deckchairs on the cliff-top and settled down to an afternoon of dozing, reading, flasks of tea and the application of sun lotion. But I felt restless as I always did, and usually still do. I didn’t want to sit around. I needed to shift my fidgety body and move, so I set off on a hike.

I look younger now and less stroppy. The huge rucksack is OTT for a short afternoon walk. My parents look wonderfully Edwardian. I, on the other hand, am an anachronism. What’s happened to their two friends? And is that my now-estranged girlfriend sitting on the deckchair? The setting and scenery are otherwise quite close to what I remember.

I first went down to the beach and walked the length of it until I came to the cliffs at the far end of the sand and, as a remedy for ennui, I then decided to climb them. They started as an easy grassy slope, then changed to a rocky scramble, and finally a steep section near the top. But I didn’t encounter any real difficulties, and my success spurred me on as I gained height. I became uncharacteristically heedless. After a final effort with legs, knees and hands, I stood on the top ledge.

I’ve tousled my hair again in preparation for this climb. I didn’t have all those carabiners back in 1972. It was more of a scramble than a rock climb. It’s a nice image though. If the cliff had any rock as steep as that, there was likely a way around the side.

But now I did have a problem because I could see no way of proceeding further. I had half a metre of ground to stand on, but dense chest-high brambles confronted me, extending many impenetrable metres in all directions. I glanced down and the previously scaleable cliff now looked dangerously vertical. I probed and kicked a little with my toe caps but couldn’t find, or see, any footholds. Anybody foolish enough to have engaged in reckless climbing will recognise this situation. It explains why cats get stuck up trees.

Yikes, no way was it as scary as that, but the brambles are just right. I’ve changed back from shorts to long trousers. They’ll be useful for the brambles.

What to do? I needed help, so I had to summon it. It’s a cliché to shout help! but you need to shout something when you shout, so why not help? I guess if I’d had a whistle I could have blown that six times, but I had no such thing. So I shouted the cliché and, after a few minutes, a man on the beach below seemed to notice. It took a while because I called out rather half-heartedly at first, as you might imagine, like when you know you need to vomit but are also desperate to avoid the unpleasantness of so doing. The man signalled by hand gestures that he intended to come up, presumably by some more sensible route. I waited and waited and wondered whether I had misunderstood him. I also had time to ponder and look around me. I spotted a helicopter over the open sea heading toward my cliff.

Hmm, my rock shelf is facing the other way now and isn’t quite so fearsome. It’s closer to the 1972 real-world version. The man who helped me was older than the guy in the image, and he was down on the beach. He didn’t climb up like that. He had more sense.

At length a woman appeared on the other side of the brambles. She had come from a nearby house and I assumed the man must have alerted her. She said she would fetch a ladder to throw over the brambles. I can’t remember at this distance in time whether it was me or the woman who came up with the ladder idea. I’d like to think it was me, that I had some agency and initiative after being so daft, but I don’t recall.

Okay, the real 1970s woman was wearing a bikini. But I haven’t told the AI yet, so it’s opted for modesty. Also, I’ve become more urchin-like. Does this symbolise the psychological hit I took by asking for help? The ladder was, in reality, laid horizontally over the brambles. In the image it doesn’t seem to serve any useful purpose.

By now the helicopter I’d spotted earlier was hovering directly over me, and I found this most disturbing. Had my parents called out air-sea rescue? Surely not, since I’d only been gone for an hour. But then I remembered that my father always had his binoculars with him on holiday. Perhaps he’d had them trained on me and had seen me climbing the cliff, despite the considerable distance that separated us? I had a headline ready for the local papers and, who knows, even the national ones. STUDENT’S FOLLY SPARKS WASTED CHOPPER CALLOUT.

There are three guys on the top of the cliff now. There ought to be just me and the older man, plus the bikini woman.

But this concern dissipated as the situation began to make sense. The youngish ladder-woman had emerged bikini-clad from sunbathing in her garden. Drawn in by her pale body, the RAF chopper guys had descended. They banked, waved at her enthusiastically, and made off. You expected this sort of thing in the seventies. One side took it as a perk of the job. The other, no doubt, as inevitable.

The story’s been garbled. The woman does now have a swimsuit on, but it’s hardly a bikini, more of a 1940s swimming costume. Some kind of call-the-midwife figure is waving at the helicopter, but it’s the helicopter crew who are supposed to be doing the waving. I don’t know what’s happened to me.

Now safely on the landward side of the brambles, I thanked the bikini lady for the use of her ladder and finally met the man who’d responded to my shouting. But sadly I’d got it into my head that you had to offer to buy somebody a drink in a situation like this. Had I seen it in a film or on TV, or read it in a book? Anyway men did this in the fully grown-up world, I thought, as opposed to the student one I ordinarily inhabited. But this man, though forty-ish, clearly hadn’t taken on board the same films, TV or books as me, and he made his excuses. Likely he hoped to get on his way as quickly as possible and escape from the high-maintenance student. This final snub was the only real embarrassment I carried away with me that day. I’d been a kitten stuck up a tree but, more mortifying still, I didn’t yet know how to relate to the alley cats.

Okay, the dent to my ego has definitely changed me into a young urchin, and the stress has turned the guy who helped me into an elderly bucolic. I’m not old enough to be offering to buy anybody a drink, so no wonder he refused.

FOOTNOTE My parents told me later that they’d witnessed an actual rescue involving that same helicopter, and my father had indeed been using his binoculars. But it was to watch the unfolding maritime drama, and not my antics. A small boat had drifted out to sea and the helicopter had winched up its desperate, sunburnt and dehydrated occupants.

Well, there’s my father with his binoculars. I was going to say the people in the boat wouldn’t have had life jackets, but I guess the helicopter crew issued them.

The above is instructive. After all, if our fellow humans are unfamiliar with our life and culture they may generate inaccurate mental pictures when we tell them stories. We never see these human mental images, but the AI’s can be made visible.

Second Guessing

I’m a native English speaker but there are occasional phrases that I don’t fully know the meaning of. In my last post it was jumping the shark. In this post it’s second guess. As I wrote in Jumping the Shark you obviously get a rough idea from the way the phrase is used, but you’d need to look it up to find out the correct meaning and usage, and you never get round to doing that. Alternatively you could ask, but you’re even less likely to do that. In any case, people are typically not good at defining words or phrases. You feel you ought to know, and the longer you leave it before asking the more embarrassing it becomes.

So today we were discussing an event we’re attending this evening, a book signing followed by a talk and dinner, but we didn’t know exactly what the format would be. We’re supposed to arrive after 6 pm and the talk or dinner will be at 7 pm. So what will we do between 6 and 7 pm? Will the talk and dinner happen simultaneously at 7 pm? So I said there was no point in second guessing. We might as well wait for the event and see what happens. Now I didn’t think for one minute that I was using the phrase correctly when I said that, yet somehow it sounded right in my head. It sounded better than merely saying that there was no point in guessing. Maybe it sounded cleverer, albeit clever and wrong. After all, if you have a phrase in your head, you want to give it an outing from time to time, like clothes that aren’t quite right. When else will you get a chance to wear them?

At the time of writing I’ve already looked up the true meaning of second guessing, and it occurs to me that I should have waited before doing that, because I now want to discuss what I thought it meant before I looked it up. That memory may now be contaminated by having looked it up. I’ll try anyway. My original idea of what it meant came from a colleague at work, who used the phrase a lot. From his usage, I took it to signify that the second guesser was coming up with an alternative (second) guess based on the same information as somebody else who had made the first guess. And there was no reason to think his second guess (or opinion) was any better than the first guess (or opinion) since they were both guesses. There was no harm in that second guess, but if you were implicitly criticising the first guesser you were being a bit foolish. So I googled second guess and turned up a few definitions drawn from various dictionaries. They were fairly consistent but there did seem to be different shades of meaning. I then turned to ChatGPT to give me an overview, something it’s pretty good at, and this is what it said.

To second guess somebody or something means to question or doubt a decision, action, or opinion after it has been made, often with the benefit of hindsight. This term implies a level of scepticism or a desire to critique a choice that was previously considered settled, suggesting that an alternative decision might have been better. It can be applied in various contexts, such as personal decisions, sports strategies, business moves, or any situation where choices are made and later reconsidered or doubted by oneself or others. Second guessing can also reflect a natural human tendency to reassess situations with new information or after seeing the outcomes of certain actions, though it can sometimes lead to unnecessary stress or indecision if overdone.

So the true meaning is similar to being wise after the event. My meaning, although not far out, was more about being wise before the event – before there’s any benefit from hindsight. Finally, there really needs to be a phrase in English to describe our pre-book-signing mental state, a phrase for guessing about some future event when you’ll know for sure soon enough. I propose election-nighting.

Dream Stone Town

Dream stone town
North or Scots
With all the standard frights
Of drivers’ fretful sleep
The cars that will not stop
No matter what the force of braking
That will not climb the hill
The parking
And the failure to recall
Precise location

We’ve lots of c’lebs
The locals tell me
That live round here
And football wives

I peer through squares of swirly glass
Down halls of terraced houses
In one there stands a tanned
Impassive and hard-bodied lady
With big black hair and glitter-shadow eyes
She stares ahead but sees me not
Through all the cluttered dark
Of vestibule and mullion

Across the street
A skinny blue-veined woman
Flashes wide her Russian furs

I find my coaching inn hotel
They seat me in their roast-beef room
All set about with dressers Welsh
And propped-up plates
The other guests legitimately booked
And me without a reservation

Like that stolen lunch
On that training day
When I lost my way
And stumbled into
The plates of food
In room Eleven A

This, I believe, is what they seek
When they fly out to Thailand
Though it’s hard to find in this leaden world
Be it ever so sunny and blue
Sick of the mud and the rain of old England
The Bounty’s men set sail for Tahiti
But even in the Southern Ocean
The spirit cannot move so gaily
As in my dream
With all its flitting weightless freedom

Christ came down to save us all
They say
From this leaden world

Jumping the Shark

Today I decided to find out what the phrase jumping the shark means, and where it comes from. You know how it is. You hear a word or phrase over and over. It would be so easy to look it up and check, but you don’t. Of course you’ve got some idea of its meaning from how it’s used, and in this respect you’re like a non-native speaker trying to learn English by immersion in the language. And the so-called irony here is that I’ve probably learnt its true meaning too late, because everybody’s stopped using it by now. Yes, come to think of it, I haven’t heard anybody saying it lately.

What triggered my decision to look it up was a vague feeling that it might apply to my AI-generated images. You see, I’ve noticed that these types of images are cropping up a lot on various social media, which makes me wonder how long I can continue to use them. The style and colour palette of the default images are quite samey: corny and cheesy you might say. Some of them (old Brit reference alert) are like those paintings you used to see on Boots’ staircase. Pretty soon people are going to start mocking them, if they haven’t already, especially if the far right begin using AI to generate images of hoards of furriners on the streets of London. Obviously I could try giving more sophisticated instructions to ChatGPT in order to add stylistic variety, but I’m not sure I could be bothered. My feeling is that I’m using the images ironically, so it doesn’t matter. However the problem with doing anything ironically is that people need to know you’re doing it ironically. Or maybe they don’t need to know. Maybe that doesn’t matter either.

Well, after all that self-flagellation, jumping the shark doesn’t seem to be a great fit for my predicament. As far as I can see it refers to the moment when a TV series (or other creative endeavour) starts to go downhill following some gimmicky and risible content. The original shark-jumping was a scene in Happy Days where Fonzie jumped over a shark while water skiing. The show, apparently, was never the same after that. (I can’t comment because I never watched it.) In Happy Days the shark was part of the show. I insist that my shark and show are two separate things!