Nuts and bolts go together like fish and chips, salt and pepper and bread and butter. In another context we have lock and key, chalk and cheese (though these two don’t get along very well), pen and ink (This meant copy.) Bricks need mortar and go nowhere without it. Tide and time wait for no man. Latitude and longitude compartmentalise the globe though it took humans some time to realise this. Hours and minutes place us in time.
Time was when we learned to tie our shoe-laces. We also learned to write in sentences. Now we learn to tick boxes. Longhand and copperplate and Papal Chancery Cursive will be forgotten skills. The nib and dip pen have vanished. The keyboard has triumphed.
Gone will be our times tables. Gone will be our proverbs, our nursery rhymes. Gone will be those poems we carried – at least partially – in our heads – Browning’s best: ‘How they brought the good news’ and ‘The Pied Piper’, G.K. Chesterton’s: ‘The Donkey’ and, for the more ambitious, Milton’s ‘Ode on the morning of Christ’s nativity’.
We shall be the poorer for it. What will take the place of these memorable metered words? I am ashamed to say: passwords. People nowadays have to carry wallets filled with cards that do what we cannot – remember those vital words that allow us to enter our own property and do business.
When a thing becomes technically possible, it will be done. Abhorrent though it is, this includes providing car-drivers with dangerous distractions in the shape of mobile phones and making available our pals at the touch of a button. Talking of buttons, we all pay tribute to the genius who brought them into the world. Even Cinderella has her Buttons.
For those of a religious cast of mind the couple may have been the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer, or the Old and New Testaments or even Hebrew and Greek. Inescapable it may be. It or something like it is found in all religions. It stands alone. It is not part of a couple.
LIKE A CATHEDRAL
The majestic, cathedral-like church of St Michael and All Angels, Blantyre, Malawi was built in 1888-1891 by David Scott, who, they say, had no architectural experience. No drawings or sketches of the work survive. Blantyre, Malawi is a city of 800,000 inhabitants.
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