Machines Like Me

by Ian McEwan

What was tedious was the prospect of the user’s guide. Instructions. My prejudice was that any machine that could not tell you by its very functioning how it should be used was not worth its keep.

An old friend of mine, a journalist, once said that paradise on earth was to work all day alone in anticipation of an evening in interesting company.

He had movements, phrases, routines that gave him a veneer of plausibility. Minimally, he knew what to do, but little else. Like a man with a shocking hangover.

There’s a special sensuousness in an unshared bed, at least for a period, until sleeping alone begins to assume its own quiet sadness.

Many years later I thought I saw the ghost of Alan Turing in the figure of the painter Lucian Freud. I crossed his path late one night as he came out of the Wolseley in Piccadilly. Same lean fitness in early old age that seemed derived less from healthy living than from a hunger to keep on creating.

The humid air carried a scent of cannabis, like a fond memory of a long day.