When I was at University I had a digital watch. It was a just a simple black Casio affair. One day, the strap broke. I carried the watch face around with me for a while until I could afford a replacement. I had entertained thoughts of hooking it to the end of a chain like a kind of 1980s Victorian pocket-watch, just to be bohemian and different.
I didn't do that though. Oh no. I did this:
I collected together a bunch of AA batteries, wrapped them together with a cable tie and stuck them to a circuit board. Then I wired in a few capacitors and resistors I'd borrowed from the physics lab, before completing the arrangement by taping the plastic watch face to the front.
Then, rather naively, I set the watch to count down from 6 hours to zero and stuck the whole device firmly onto my housemate's door with a massive lump of blu-tac.
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I'm only mentioning it now because I can't quite believe I did that. Today, that kind of thing would probably get somebody arrested. I just thought it would be funny. No-one in their right mind would imagine it was an actual bomb, surely? I thought it might give the cleaners a giggle when they came round. They could have used a laugh.
That was 1996. Today feels very different. The world has grown paranoid and cynical and I feel old and boring; far from the young Machiavellian pranking of boisterous physics undergrads. When I suggested to our placement student here at work, that he could crown his final year by putting bubble bath in the fountain, he looked at me as though the idea had come from another world, beyond the stars, where anything was possible; or perhaps that I was mad, it's hard to tell now that I think about it.
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I'm not advocating the manufacture of fake bombs (or of real ones). I'm not really suggesting that someone should pollute the city centre's water supply. I'm just saying that things are different and I think that's a shame. But what's changed? The world? Me? Both of us? My main task today is to move files from one folder to another. Where are the laser experiments? Where are the songs? the late-night piano moments? Where is the copse of silver birches that looked out over the city on sunset nights and made us dream?
Perhaps we should start reclaiming the imagination we lost. I've long suspected that the more you know, the harder it is to imagine. Imagination is an innate feature of the young - we're born with it, unrestricted by the boundaries of knowledge and age. Anything and everything is possible to our inchoate eyes... then as time goes by, the boxes grow smaller, the walls come down and the limits crush ever inwards like the sides of a trash compactor. We hear those voices that teach us words like 'impossible' and 'silly' and 'nonsense' and worse, we start to believe them.
What if we could claim it back? What if that imagining were still possible? What if, with all our grown-up skill, we could actually use that natural unlimited way of thinking and live in the overlap? I think that's what Einstein did. I think that's what Hendrix, Lear and Handel and Winehouse and Bohr and AA Milne and JK Rowling all learned how to do.
I'd love to be able to do that.
... still, these files aren't going to move themselves.
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