Buying experiences
Experiences can now be bought all over the internet – cooking, travel, adventure, you name it. Experiences used to be spontaneous, unexpected and exciting but now, due perhaps to people with money but no time or imagination, they are packaged and bought. Genuine experiences can never be bought – like buying sex, it can be done but there’s something contrived about it.

Spot the ads
Adverts used to be quite creative, oh, back in the 1980s. I’m not sure why it took me so long to work this out, but the adverts on the free Spotify are purposely created to be so annoying that you’re forced to buy a premium account. And you know what? It works.

Top ten obscure female folk singers
1. Karen Dalton (1937-1993)
2. Vashti Bunyan (b.1945)
3. Anne Briggs (b.1944)
4. Bridget St John (b.1946)
5. Linda Perhacs (b.1943)
6. Molly Drake (1915-1993; mum of Nick)
7. Martha Tilston (b.1975)
8. Jean Ritchie (1922-2015)
9. Mimi Farina (1945-2001)
10. Rosalie Sorrels (1933-2017)

Stone the Amazon
From Banksy to Starbucks, I go off everything once it becomes too big, popular or mainstream. I’ve done my best not to buy from Amazon and Waterstones for years now but it gets hard – especially when they buy companies without telling me, and keep the original companies name. In the past, Waterstones have opened ‘unbranded’ bookshops (they have their own brand, just not Waterstones) in towns in Suffolk, Hertfordshire and East Sussex. More recently, Waterstones have bought Blackwells but will keep the Blackwells name, which is annoying as I used to buy from Blackwells (if ever forced to buy a new – i.e. not secondhand – book). Amazon, on the other hand, have bought over 100 companies over the years, and have now – after successfully decimated the high street – started opening actual Amazon shops (with no protests or opposition), though they’ve already shut most of them down.

Getting personal with Google
We ask Google more personal questions than we ask friends or family. Why don’t people like me? What’s the best way to kill myself? Am I good in bed? Is everything going to be okay? What’s the meaning of life? It’s like people imagine Google to be some kind of omnipresent God (Goodle/Goddle?). But Google doesn’t care. We want an instant answer from the search engine, from today’s weather to whether there’s life after death.

Top 15 films set in mainly one place
1. 12 Angry Men (Lumet, 1957)
2. Room (Abraganson, 2015)
3. La Cabina (Mercero, 1972)
4. The Guilty (Möller, 2018)
5. The Exterminating Angel (Bunuel, 1962)
6. Cube (Natali, 1997)
7. Das Boot (RIP Wolfgang Petersen, 1981)
8. The Breakfast Club (Hughes, 1985)
9. 10 Cloverfield Lane (Trachtenberg, 2016)
10. Coherence (Byrkit, 2013)
11. Rear Window (Hitchcock, 1954)
12. Free Fire (Wheatley, 2016)
13. Tape (Linklater, 2001)
14. The Thing (Carpenter, 1982)
15. My Dinner With Andre (Malle, 1981)

Imprinted owls
Some time ago we met two women with owls as pets giving them some air along the river by Totnes. They were stroking them (bad for owls as it removes the waterproofing on their feathers), and telling us they were ideal pets. I forgot about the incident for six months then came across an article on imprinted owls. Imprinting is a natural process that occurs in the first hours of many animals lives, when they don’t know what species they are. Most owls will know they’re owls, but if an owl is imprinted by a human – that is, a person is the first thing they see when they hatch out of an egg – then apparently that owl will think it’s a human.

This is done often in zoos, bird of prey centres and flying displays in order to control owls and other animals. For the owl is it obviously very confusing and upsetting – they have been known to try and mate with humans. Once an owl has been imprinted to a human it is almost impossible to change the owl back to thinking it’s an owl. It can’t be released into the wild as it wouldn’t know how to act with other owls and can’t mate.

Invisible Worlds
We’re living in a material world, sang Madonna, and indeed it sometimes seems as if that’s true, bombarded as we are with the ‘every day’. Luckily it is all an illusion and the many invisible worlds are, for many, far more real than all this [gestures out to houses, roads, shops etc].

The spiritual world, the microscopic world, the quantum world – it’s curious how once again there’s an overlap between the scientific and the supernatural, like there used to be in the Middle Ages (John Dee, advisor to Elizabeth I, studied science, maths, alchemy and the occult with equal zest).

Even so, there’s always that nagging feeling, that proverbial soundless tree falling in the forest (or colour existing without light), would any of the invisible worlds be there if we hadn’t gone looking for them?

Previously on Barnflakes
Notes on nothing
Notes on…