It came through on the family WhatsApp group. It was a picture of Grace, my cousin Steve's one year-old daughter. She's sitting on a park bench wearing a pink outfit with cherry trees in full bloom behind her. The picture was an explosion of pink. Pink everywhere. Pink everything. It radiated cuteness in its pinkness. Great picture, I said. Amazing blossom! I looked at it for a few seconds longer. The trees, I thought. The trees look suspicious. Do cherry trees that vibrant exist in Britain? Did Steve and Jo take Grace to Kyoto without telling us? Two minutes later, I messaged the group again. Is the background AI? It looks like it, Mum replied. Nothing gets past me, I thought. My analogue brain worked out how they did it. I had it sussed. AI background, real bench and they scattered fake pink fabric petals on the bench to make the background look more realistic. Clever. Very clever. Two weeks later, Auntie Di, Grace's Grandma comes to visit. I was looking at that picture of Grace, I said. Di knew the one I was talking about. Is the background AI? It's all AI, she replied. All AI? I said. Yeah, she said. The background, the bench, the dress. What? I said. The dress is AI? Yes, she said. And the pink headband. And those lovely little pink shoes. It's a lovely outfit, she said. It really suits her.
It was a few weeks into autumn and I hadn’t had a hair cut since before the summer solstice. My beard, long and straggly and in desperate need of trimming, was a week away from having birds nest in it. I unpolished my boots and wore some old jeans that were ripped at the knees and dirty from digging a deep hole on a particularly wet day in Highgate Cemetery. Hanging loosely over the top of those was a baggy grey jumper I spilt half a bottle of bleach over about three years ago. I looked a bit of a state, but there was a method to my madness. Today was the day I was going to ask Moon for a pay rise and I wanted to look as if I’d been trod on. On the morning I was due to ask him, my bike got a puncture not twenty yards down the road from my house. It wasn’t a polite slow puncture so that I might finish my journey on a squidgy but rideable front tyre; the thorn tore through that poor inner tube like a javelin through jelly and it had me riding on a stee...
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