Today’s rain has turned the leaves and grass a superb emerald green worthy of Kerry itself, so it has. At the minute, Sloggers’ Roost looks an absolute picture of pristine, luscious fecundity: the bad news is that with the next ten days looking like the rain/sun thing that renders Lot et Garonne a fruit area of abundance sans pareil, fecundity will turn into a f**king enormous growth rate in the grass space, and this is not what the doctor (or indeed The Slog) ordered.

Either way, the inclement weather has given your correspondent the opportunity to take a closer and hopefully more measured look at the nature of Windows 8. And I am bound to say that, on mature reflection, this version of the Magoosoft vision is even more anti-socially unfriendly than Multimate II, a program I gratefully said goodbye to in 1991.

Looking back 23 years later with the perspective of an older and wiser man, the unique achievement of Windows 8 is to have shown me that, contrary to any feelings I may have had at the time, Multimate II was an absolutely f**king useless program that nevertheless did not keep jumping about like a face with St Vitus Dance from one gratuitously offered App to another. Multimate II may have been incapable of processing a $ sign from the keyboard to the screen without producing the # sign, but at least the # sign didn’t keep morphing into the Acer Games-to-Cloudy-Beer App for Real Ale nerds everywhere.

Windows 8 is so riddled with half-baked complexity, the hardware supplier Acer has been compelled by its marketing department to include, with every box it sells, a six-page pamphlet entitled Getting Started with Windows 8. The reason why it takes six pages just to get this heap of horseshit to so much as start is summed up, I think, by this extract:

……………………

How do I turn off my computer?

Press

+ <c>, then click settings > power….and select the action you’d like to take.

 

…………………..

Now before Windows 8, all you needed to do was click ‘Start’ and select ‘Power off’. And in that golden age of elegant simplicity, you didn’t have to spend three days trying every Godforsaken button on the bloody keyboard until you found the tasteless double-glazed window symbol…which – well FFS obviously – was the route to turning off the motherf**king laptop.

Here’s another extract:

‘Move the cursor to the upper or lower right-hand corner of the screen to access the charms’.

Just so we’re clear about this, that was the first and sole mention of the noun ‘charm’. There is no attached explanation as to WTF a charm is, or indeed what sort of diseased mind decided it would be a good idea to ask already baffled Windows 8 victims to move the cursor to the upper or lower right-hand corner of the screen in order to locate a charmless purchasing aperture. All I can say is that every time I so much as inadvertently twitch the cursor, I am transported by Scottie back to the Apps space.

In George Orwell’s remarkably prescient novel 1984, the mark of having risen to the top of the Party was the privilege of being able to turn off the Big Brother screen. In 2014, one can of course turn off the laptop, but if you do so, life will from then on be devoid of human contact, because nobody under the age of 35 either owns a landline or knows WTF a postbox is. While this represents a far more painful form of torture than anything even Orwell might have contemplated, I’m afraid it’s only a matter of time before failure to download (and use) the inevitable Ankle Jewellery App will one day very soon represent a social-correction offence (SCO).

No right-thinking person would want to clog up the Courts with such trivia, and so trials would be bypassed in favour of the Instant Big House Below Stairs Servant Incarceration System, designed to match the needs of oligarchs and SCO offenders to mutual advantage.

Business no longer exists to supply our needs or satisfy our desires. It is there to fiddle everything from exchange rates to share values in order to keep viable the very insurance institutions that propose to supply the pensions we will never receive, and at the same time ensure that the impression of Business As Usual is maintained. The obscenity of this ever-decreasing cycle is that such pensions as ever emerge from it will be gobbled up by the few, and remain forever beyond the each of the many.

But even after this has come to pass, grass will still turn a deeper green after rain, and then grow taller. Flowers and tree blossom will still emit scents, bees will pollinate stuff, cows will calf, sparrow hawk wives will terrrorise sparrow hawk blokes, and most people in rural France will plant food, swop abundance with each other, and block autoroutes when the lunatics take so much as one step beyond.

Hold onto that hope. It may not be much, but it’s all that we have.

Earlier at The Slog: Jewish terrorist Jezzer Bornstable’s exhibitionist arrival on a donkey