We live in France. In Lille, where the language is French. About a year ago — not knowing anything about the animal — I bought a HomePod online. I had thought it was just a superior (and very stylish) kind of loudspeaker, which I could plug into my i-phone and get it to do my mainly musical bidding. How surprised was I, and how unsurprised my wife Madeleine, to find that this was a much more sophisticated device than either of us could handle, which was not to be tamely plugged in like a dog on a lead (except to the power supply) but required talking to, and being treated with respect if not deference, whereupon it might perform one of the functions it was being asked to do. Like switch on the radio; preferably, BBC Radio 3, the beating heart of classical music.
I betray myself immediately by saying ‘it’. Because the moving spirit of the HomePod is not an ‘it’, but a she; and she is Siri. Nothing gets done unless Siri is asked politely; and unless the formula Dis, Siri is used, she won’t even listen. Dis, Siri, mets BBC Radio 3. But Siri for all her multiconnectedness cannot find the station in my library, in i-tunes, or anywhere else. She has many suggestions for other kinds of music I might like to listen to; or services to which I might like to subscribe. But one does not subscribe to BBC Radio 3, one simply switches it on. This is beyond Siri’s capacity.
Eventually, by means which I neither did nor do understand, Madeleine found a way of getting under Siri’s guard, and forcing her to acknowledge that there was indeed such a radio station, and that its offering might legitimately be accessed by the device over which she presided. Which I was then grateful to do; the fact being that you only had to tap Siri on the shoulder in the morning for her to put you in touch with Petroc Trelawney and his team. Sitting at breakfast, you could even ask Siri to increase the volume, or turn it down, depending on one’s interest in the piece then being broadcast. Turn it up always for the news. (Not that this is always a wise decision.)
One problem that we soon became aware of was that Siri seemed to have a mind or a will of her own. Sometimes she refused point-blank to connect with Radio 3, and regaled us instead with some charming nursery rhymes and songs for children which Madeleine had stored on one of her other devices. (How Siri found these I can’t imagine.) On one surreal occasion, she even interrupted our dinner with the spontaneous question: did we intend to buy a new car? Sometimes she resorted to her old trick of saying that Radio 3 didn’t exist, and that we should be listening to something else. And quite recently she has stumbled on another subterfuge: when asked, strictly according to the formula, for Radio 3, she connects us instead to BBC Radio Scotland. Now I have nothing against the Scots; I even support their desire to be independent of Brexit-touting Westminster. And it’s true that Mendelssohn wrote some fine music up there, around Fingal’s Cave. But this is not the point.
Another hazard of the system is that our grandchildren, two adventurous boys, soon learned the abracadabra that would open Siri’s cave, and developed a relationship with her that involved exchanging jokes, demanding translations into remote languages, and setting her conundrums to which she was forced to confess she did not know the answer. There were also less polite interpellations to which she disdained any response. It was during one of these sessions, recently, that I (returning home with some complicated bad news) became extremely irritated, and seized the HomePod off the shelf, disconnected Siri from her electric soul, and — not knowing where to put this package for the moment –dropped it into the waste paper basket by my desk. It could be put back, and she disciplined, later. Which of course it wasn’t.
This happened on a Wednesday. Thursday is the day our long-time cleaning lady comes for the morning, to do various jobs such as washing the tiled floor, emptying the grate, ironing, etcetera. Normally we would be around, to oversee what was going on and to answer any questions she might have. But this morning Madeleine and I were attending the funeral of a friend, and so Sylviane was left to her own devices. (Devices!) The rest of the day being busy (we went to the theatre that night, to see what turned out to be a long and not very good play), it was not until I lay awake early next morning — I often enjoy a few moments’ quiet reflection, before the alarm rings around seven — that I realized I had never removed the irritating HomePod from the waste paper basket; and that unimaginable things might have happened to it at Sylviane’s most innocent hands.
Go downstairs in my dressing gown. Unlock the front door, out into the cold December morning. Look into the paper bin; nothing to be seen. Look into the general waste bin: two neatly tied bags of household rubbish. Resolve to research into this more fully after breakfast, with Madeleine. (Whose slumber I had punctured with this absurdity.) After breakfast, alerted by a tell-tale yellow cable just visible, we open one of the bags, and indeed find the disgraced HomePod, its stylish orange mesh covered in ash from the fire-grate. Madeleine interrupted my expostulations, and we took the thing inside. With a mixture of brushing and hoovering, it looked again a bit like the device I had once most inadvisedly purchased. But did it still work? Would Siri speak to us again, after this humiliation? We plugged it in, there was a glow from the disc on top, and Madeleine asked, tentatively, for BBC Radio 3. To which Siri, in her usual cheerful tones: Voici BBC Radio Scotland.
© Damian Grant, 2023
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SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS
‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement
‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine
‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian
‘This comprehensive, meticulously researched and highly readable biography, which the author describes as a “story” rather than an academic biography…’ Michael Pursglove, East-West Review
‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter
‘The book is written with great assurance and the reader always feels in safe hands. I liked the idea of it being a story and I read it the same way I would read a novel.’ Harvey Pitcher, writer
‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18
A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.
A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.
Thank you for this glorious post, Damian! One appreciates — ‘experiences’, so to speak — the full gamut of your emotions from intense irritation with Siri to sheepish contrition and a resurgent, Sisyphean hope…that is dashed. But don’t you, as a Blakean, find it somehow encouraging that even such fantastically clever Satanic technology can unaccountably go barmy? I am reminded of a sentence in Chekhov’s story ‘In the Hollow’: ‘They put a telephone into the Council offices, but it soon stopped working as bed bugs and German cockroaches bred in it.’ A neighbour, by the way, was given the British version of your HomePod by her husband for her birthday (but it is green and squat, like an unfinished Tower of Babel) and complains that it won’t give her the one thing she wants — Radio 4!
Thank you Patrick for this. (Incidentally, Radio Scotland was actually referred to by Pedroc Trelawney on Radio 3 this morning: giving the results of a singing competition.) I think that Babel is a good image for so many of these new contraptions, each one sleeker, faster, more expensive, and more unintelligible than the last. Are they not, in fact, presages of entropy, the return to elementary disorder? I am made to think of the last lines of The Dunciad:
Lo! thy dread Empire, CHAOS! is restor’d;
Light dies before thy uncreating word;
Thy hand, great Anarch! lets the curtain fall;
And Universal Darkness buries all.
(Zuckerberg and Musk are surely better candidates than Colley Cibber for the Anarch.)