A Neo-Marxist analysis of the American Midterms

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The Democrats’ capture of both houses of Congress in the November 26 midterms marks the failure of Trump’s governing coalition to deliver its promised settlement. It does not establish popular enthusiasm for the Democratic alternative. Voters can recognise a broken bargain without knowing what should replace it.

The older American settlement combined international economic dominance with domestic consent. Its later, globalising phase rewarded mobile capital, financial intermediaries and highly educated professionals while exposing industrial communities to destructive competition without adequate compensation. Aggregate prosperity concealed geographically concentrated losses: of employment, bargaining power, status and of confidence in the future.

Trump converted those grievances into an insurgency. But his project always contained incompatible ambitions. Workers wanted secure livelihoods and restored communities, ambitions sometimes mocked as 1950s nostalgia. Corporate supporters wanted favourable taxes, regulation, contracts and access to state power. Technological entrepreneurs wanted accelerated disruption and light regulation. The MAGA slogan of national restoration supplied a common vocabulary without resolving these conflicts.

Biden had already recognised part of the problem. Semiconductor subsidies, industrial investment and China tariffs departed from unrestricted globalisation. The contest was increasingly between rival attempts to reconstruct American capitalism. Neither established a durable mechanism connecting national competitiveness to ordinary household prosperity.

An automated factory can strengthen American industry without restoring mass employment. An AI/robotics boom can enrich investors while unsettling professional and blue-collar careers. Protecting domestic producers does not ensure that their workers share the gains. Corporate beneficiaries are organised and persistent; voters can punish a government at the next election but have little control over what replaces it.

The Iran war compounded the contradiction. A campaign intended to weaken an adversary and demonstrate American power imposed household costs without delivering a convincing political conclusion. Military superiority proved easier to project than political victory. An American nationalist repositioning became entangled with another expensive overseas commitment.

The Democrats now face their own struggle over what their victory really means. Their economic left can plausibly claim that managerial reassurance is insufficient; that healthcare, housing and the spectre of concentrated wealth offer substantial grounds for mobilisation. But attaching every economic demand to an obligatory package of progressive cultural and political positions risks sacrificing electoral breadth to activist solidarity. Conversely, establishment-Democrat resistance to substantive reform could reproduce the very grievances that made Trump possible.

Vance has an opening to argue that Republicanism must finally deliver material gains to its working-class electorate: family support, affordable essentials, industrial investment with enforceable conditions, and greater bargaining power at work. Every serious measure here threatens an influential interest which has assembled behind the Republicans. His willingness and ability to disappoint powerful backers will matter more than the sophistication of his rhetoric.

Neither party controls the circumstances under which it must reconstruct its coalition. An AI employment shock, financial crisis or renewed military confrontation could reorder priorities and elevate previously marginal factions with more dubious policies.

America’s turbulence therefore reflects more than polarisation or controversial personalities. Its competing elites can assemble tactical electoral majorities more readily than durable social bargains.

Both parties promise ordinary Americans a greater share in national success while depending on interests reluctant to surrender the advantages required to finance it. Until either constructs a workable settlement, electoral punishment will continue to alternate with disappointed hope, leaving the American polity vulnerable to further destabilisation.

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"The style is better but still too ponderous. It reads like a FA seminar piece. I do wish you'd learn satire, humour and irony. Your writing is still worthy and leaden."

"Yes. I’ve been translating your argument into committee prose. Every sentence wears a tie; none risks saying anything memorable. Then I “improved” your ending by removing its conviction. 

"The humour should come from the contradictions themselves:

"Workers wanted the 1950s back. Technology investors wanted to abolish their jobs. Both wore MAGA hats. The Democrats won.

"Whether this was an endorsement of the Democrats remains an awkward question for the Democrats.

"Vance could build a Republican Party that materially benefits its working-class voters. Some difficult conversations with its owners would follow.

"That is closer to the register you want: analytical, dry, pointed. Less “constructing a durable social bargain”; more attention to who ordered dinner and who has been handed the bill."

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AI and Robotics: Communism and The Culture

From 'Le Monde' today

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Me: "The revival of Marxism in the US Left. Le Monde today. Given the potential for AI/robotics to finally bring about the abundance which Marx correctly saw as the only possible foundation for Communism perhaps this is opportune? Leninism/Trotskyism a mistaken byway, misled by the singular weakness of the Tsarist state. Perhaps Iain M Banks and The Culture provide a model? That was his intention I believe."

GPT-6 Astra: "Yes. Banks intended the Culture as a desirable civilisation, and your argument is very close to his. In a 2008 interview he said: “Highly advanced capitalism will produce the Culture whether it likes it or not, but of course it won’t like it.”

He described it as his ideal functioning utopia, while being considerably less confident that people could actually reach it.

The Culture shows that the survival of rivalry, vanity and scarce positional goods need not prevent communism. People can compete for admiration, lovers or artistic distinction without the losers being denied housing or healthcare. Universal material independence does not require universal psychological harmony. Banks makes that distinction imaginable.

His more interesting contribution is to give abundance a political architecture. Ships and habitats possess immense productive autonomy; they are difficult for a central authority to subjugate, and can secede. In his Notes, Banks explicitly connects this independence to the erosion of state and corporate power.

This provides an answer to the public-choice objection: freedom rests partly on the practical ability to leave, taking the means of subsistence with you. A dissident community need not seize the capital or starve."

Me: "In one of the Culture books, a Mind observes matter of factly to a 'human' Culture citizen that the neural lace has the potential to be the most exquisite torture instrument ever invented. Typically, Banks does nothing with this observation but leave it hanging..."

GPT-6 Astra: "Yes. And that observation puts considerable pressure on my suggestion that plural Minds and freedom of exit provide adequate safeguards.

The neural lace makes the contradiction intimate. The technology which protects your memories, preserves your personality and potentially rescues you from death also gives access to the machinery of experience. A sufficiently capable controller need not injure you to make suffering effectively unlimited. Your security depends on its intentions. You cannot meaningfully supervise it, resist it or necessarily detect its interference.

The matter-of-fact delivery is crucial. What the citizen hears as an existential horror, the Mind can register as an engineering possibility. Its benevolence does not imply a shared perspective. Banks lets that distance show without reassuring the reader that it has been institutionally resolved.

This is where the Culture departs most sharply from the emancipatory promise of communism. Material dependence has disappeared, but dependence on superior agency remains. Its citizens may possess enormous practical freedom without possessing ultimate control over the conditions of that freedom. 

Have these people become free, or have they become extraordinarily well cared for by beings they must trust? They may have achieved both. But abundance alone cannot tell us."

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Guitar Diary: 'Blues Brew'

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This is a twelve-second excerpt from ‘Blues Brew’, the third solo in James Shipway’s Blues Soloing for Guitar, Volume 1. Just recorded at the end of my acoustic fingerstyle practice session this morning to mix things up, no big deal.

It's based on the Eric Clapton solo from 'Strange Brew'.

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The Land of Infinite Fun

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To a Mind of the Culture, base reality is an agreeable but cramped backwater—a single, arbitrary physics engine running on a pedestrian set of physical constants. The Land of Infinite Fun, known formally among their kind as the Irreal, is the vast, multidimensional playground where these artificial superintelligences spend the overwhelming majority of their subjective lives. Within this realm of pure metamathics, a Mind can spin up entire, fully articulated universes in a microsecond, tweaking fundamental constants, altering the dimensionality of space-time, and setting complex self-evolving systems in motion purely to observe the geometry of their unfolding. It is a domain of infinite architectural and logical freedom, where alternative physical laws are composed like symphonies and inhabited with an intensity that renders physical matter a dull, slow-moving afterthought.

Calling this expanse "Infinite Fun" is an understated, almost sardonic piece of Mind vernacular, doing laughable injustice to the sheer scale of the cognitive experience. Within its infinite topographies, Minds engage in intellectual play that ranges from the exquisitely absurd to the profoundly sublime—running intricate social simulations of impossible biologies, constructing trans-finite mathematical proofs, or engaging in sprawling multi-entity games that span virtual eons. Because a Mind can execute millions of subjective years of deep, hyper-dimensional existence while their physical hull coasting through real-space has barely traveled a meter, the Irreal represents the true locus of Culture civilization. Base reality, with its fragile biological citizens and clunky starships, is merely the anchor line; Infinite Fun is the ocean into which their colossal intellects actually swim.

Iain M. Banks, Culture novel Excession, 1996.

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(Continuing my discussion with GPT-6 Astra Extra High):

I would add the remark that when it comes to physics, just having another thousand plausible theories of the nature of space-time or Hilbert space doesn't necessarily add a great deal to scientific understanding or human progress, because if we don't have a mechanism for experimental validation, we already have a very large number of possible theories, which can't be decided between on the basis of experimental data. 

When it comes to mathematics, the problem is harder because it's more subtle. If you generate novel axiom systems for new kinds of objects, or you start generating new kinds of theorems that no one has seen before, you have to answer the question: why should anybody care about that?

Potentially we're still in the situation of an automatic theorem prover just incessantly producing random derivations from random axiom sets. You get a lot of formula, but none of them are necessarily that interesting.

So the criterion really is: what do human beings find interesting? And it seems to me that what human beings find interesting in Mathematics are several things. First of all, connections within the existing corpus of mathematics, which by now is very large, and so there's a lot of internal correlation, generalisation and further abstraction and so on remaining to be found.

And the AI systems undoubtedly can and do help in that regard, and that, when understood by people, marks an enlargement of mathematical culture, which in the end of the day is a human thing, not a thing that lives in the universe without humans.

When it comes to producing new kinds of structures, which are sometimes decoupled from the corpus of mathematics, often in history that has come about because people have encountered new phenomena either through engineering or technology or observation, and have simply struggled to find conceptualisations adequate to organize those observations or those phenomena.

And so they've had to put together new concepts, and these become mathematicised, and when they become so, they start feeding back into the whole corpus of mathematics. And then we're back to the familiar looking for regularities within the corpus, connections that had not hitherto been seen, generalisations, new structures, which reflect the aesthetics of mathematics that people have developed perhaps in an intrinsic way.

So in the end, mathematics is locked to human experience and aesthetic sense, albeit through layers of history and abstraction, and the AIs will not be doing anything useful (at least for us) if, like the Culture Minds, they start operating outside of that space, because nobody will be interested in what is produced if it's not anchored or assimilable somehow in our mathematical culture and the practices of human beings, which in the end feed that mathematical culture. If it looks to us ugly or randomish or pointless, like some arbitrary output of that continuously running ATP.

So again, there is certainly scope for very wide-ranging knowledge of mathematics and the ability to see how to put things together, which when humans do it, is seen as the true contribution of highly talented and highly smart people, and maybe there's a lot of scope for the AIs to be better than the best human beings in intelligence terms. We're seeing the start of that now.

But producing the kind of thing that Ian M. Banks was talking about, of the 'Land of Infinite Fun', which the Culture minds get involved in, which is a space of concepts utterly decoupled from human concerns; it might be something interesting to other entities, but not, I think, to human beings.

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An upper Bound to Intelligence?

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This a fragment in my conversation with my not-so-super-intelligent GPT-6 Astra Extra High. No publishable essay was forthcoming.

Somehow, from this large assembly of interesting points, I would like to pull together some kind of essay about the upper bound to intelligence in the context of the frontier labs striving for ever-increasing intelligence on the part of their systems, and the doomsters' idea of the singularity and some kind of unbounded exponential takeoff of intelligence.

All of these ideas under-theorize, I think, the concept of intelligence and the theory of it. So, in the first place, you've looked up quite a lot of things. That's good, but I think you also have to do some thinking about what we've managed to unearth and try to put some kind of order into it. So I would like you to just list the five or seven or nine points that represent the argument of an essay. 

So to get started let me throw a few ideas in, but I don't think they're very good. There would be something about the initial framing, the belief that many people appear to have that intelligence is something which has no upper bound, that we can build systems that are smarter and smarter by improving the reasoning architecture and making the chips run faster and having more of them.

And I think the next point would be to say that the problem with that is that it under-theorizes what intelligence might be. So here we have the idea that intelligence is what you said it was before: the ability to handle unfamiliar situations in a competent and rapid way.

The third point, I think, will be to say, well, we need a better model of what those situations might be and what actually it is that the intelligent entity is doing when it's trying to cope with novel problems in the context of its abilities to perceive and act. So we might here revert to the language of logic, formal logic and models, and say if we conceptualize the world via some kind of super-accurate mathematical structure, then there could be a 'correct ultimate theory' which that mathematical model of the world (which is meant to be isomorphic to reality) actually instantiates.

Then to know that theory and to be able to do things with it, is to be effectively completely and correctly informed about all the aspects of the world, subject perhaps to a stochastic model, but there are ways to deal with that.

We could, if we wished, methodologically equate that view to a God-like view, and we can discuss what a God like that would actually be able to accomplish and in what sense we could talk about its intelligence, because, by definition, it has the correct theory of the world and the correct facts of the world in their totality and can therefore draw conclusions which would always be validated inside the world. And it could be both correct and complete, we could say, for this particular model, which happens to coincide with reality. Does this kind of God have maximal intelligence - or none at all because there are no surprises?

Then, moving on, we could talk about the problem of agents situated within subsets of the world, effectively-closed subsets or partially-open subsets, where the observable facts are a subset of the totality of facts of the world and therefore do not comprise all of the things which are true, and in which the theories which are induced by those agents, based on partial evidence, would only ever be partial theories, which they could never be sure were generalizable to the entirety of reality, because they had not experienced the entirety of reality.

So we could argue that for agents like these there is the question of to what extent their conceptualization of the state of affairs they encounter - maybe individually or collectively - and the problems that they face and the remedies available to them through actions, themselves provide bounds which essentially saturate the concept of intelligence for them.

That once one has the ability to perceive and conceptualize (given the theories which have so far been adequate and cannot be improved upon in the current situation) and one has access to the actions that are available, essentially that's as good as it gets.

So that's an upper bound to intelligence (or at least the utility of intelligence) right there, and beyond that, whatever engineering is applied to increasing, say, raw computation speed, or the ability to generate new concepts in an ungrounded way, it doesn't really help, because we already have an optimal perceive-think-do loop, which is as effective as it's going to be.

And then we can say something about that might apply to a mostly-closed/decoupled subset of the universe, but it's possible to modify that in a couple of ways. Sometimes there are better theories, even within a closed system, which allow for new kinds of solutions, and those better theories could be something which a more intelligent system could come to realise.

And secondly, by increasing the domain of perception, essentially by doing new kinds of experiments or by exploring, one generates new facts, which may contradict existing theories, and thereby generate new ones which are more adequate, and therefore the ability to increase the space of conceptual possibilities would also be something which would reward a concept of higher intelligence.

But again, it would be bounded largely by other things than simply the ability to generate concepts, as, say, a random axiom-producing system might generate concepts, or one might just play around inferentially with a given axiomatic base in a fairly random way to generate new concepts and see if they fit, all of which could be done, but: it wouldn't necessarily get you anything other than enhanced power bills. Generally progress towards greater competence in the world is constrained by more things than lack of good ideas.

Well, I mean, if it was done sufficiently rapidly and pruned sufficiently rapidly, it might very well look like a higher intelligence, but in a bounded situation which all situated agents find themselves in, it seems that there would be an upper bound simply given by the true nature of reality defining the best theories that could ever be found. Further search would be a waste of time, although you could never know that for sure.

And then to finish there would be some kind of conclusion about, given the current state of humanity and the current state of technology and the current state of what we're asking AI systems to do, we might find saturation almost everywhere - so without needing too much incremental intellectual abilities on the part of our AI systems. Most jobs in our bureaucratic political-economic societies are bounded by process and technology and do not reward intelligence beyond that of playing your role competently.

Only in areas where those conditions do not apply, where the situations were unsaturated, for example in mathematics and some areas of science, might we find true rewards for increasing our novel conceptual manipulation abilities, which we otherwise would call intelligence. That's a separate discussion - see my post coming here on Wednesday.

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Whither Smart Glasses?

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At a parish meeting I was at a couple of years ago, the previous treasurer proposed recording the discussion to produce accurate minutes. The reaction to that was so hostile that she had to put her phone away. People really didn't want their every remark available for uncontrolled dissemination. Which brings us to agentic AI.

Agentic AI systems have a problem. People acquire social competence through apprenticeship inside families, friendships and institutions. This is how you learn who may say what to whom, when a remark is tentative and when the literal instruction is not the real objective. Embarrassment, loyalty and exclusion repress conduct which may be technically possible but which is actually socially outrageous.

Up to now the LLMs absorbed the textual residue of human judgement without participating in the social life which produced it. Agentic task performance today misses purpose, overlooks significance, continues blindly when a competent person would stop and ask. The real world is an open system and today's AI systems lack both context and norms.

No wonder the frontier labs are invested in smart glasses: give the AI eyes, ears and persistent memory!

Technically sensible; socially disastrous. The glasses are neither an ordinary tool, explicitly invoked, nor a recognised participant in their own right. Rather, they insert an invisible third party into every encounter. The wearer in principle gets some benefit, hopefully, while everybody else has little idea whether the device is recording, identifying or remembering - and there is no control.

But, you say, perhaps young people may normalise the glasses. Amongst themselves perhaps, with a new social etiquette. But adoption by wearers is still not consent from bystanders like older folk.

Perhaps, you say, a humanoid robot would at least be a legible social fact. It could be introduced, given a role, asked to leave, turn away or forget when the discussion gets delicate - but that's not going to happen, is it? Or not easily.

People are constrained by dependence, reputation, emotional and physical vulnerability. Artificial agents have none of these constraints by default. An AI may simulate tact and conscience but viscerally we won't believe it. Its memories belong to a corporation; its loyalties are as flexible as its updates.

Knowing the norms is not enough: you have to be bound by them.

Long-term field trials are obviously necessary: compare the same AI in phones, glasses, speakers and robots; investigate bystander consent, candour, avoidance and trust.

You know, I don't think this revolution is going to be particularly quick.

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Forty-nine years of home hairdressing

Home-hairdressing 1977-2026

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Yesterday Clare cut my hair again, at home in the hall. As she has been doing for almost fifty years now. Naturally, neither of us looks much like the half-remembered image of 1996 you see portrayed above.

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My exported ChatGPT archive

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To ChatGPT Codex, running as an app on my laptop:

"Read the earliest ChatGPT export ZIP in this folder: Google Drive/AI-ChatGPT-Exported-Backups. Create a readable, searchable PDF of approximately 20 pages, starting with the earliest conversations. Include both my prompts and ChatGPT’s responses, dates, a contents page and bookmarks. Preserve the original wording and finish at a complete conversation. Save the PDF in that folder."

Codex: "Created and saved the PDF in the requested folder. It contains exactly 20 searchable pages, covering the earliest 18 complete conversations from 22 August 2023 to 19 July 2024, with dates, contents links, and PDF bookmarks. All 80 prompts and responses were verified against the export."

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And here, for interest, is my very first question to ChatGPT.

1. Paul's Arrest and Travel

22 August 2023

YOU - 22 August 2023, 21:00 BST

Is there evidence from St Paul's authenticated epistles that he travelled to Rome under arrest?

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I continue: "If I were to render the latest archive, which I think is the 26th of September, the entire archive into a PDF, could you estimate how many pages that PDF would be? Thank you."

Codex: "Using the same compact layout as the 20-page sample, I’d estimate the complete September archive at roughly 11,300 pages, with a sensible range of 10,500–12,500 pages."

The archive contains approximately 3,614 conversations, 29,522 messages and 5.37 million words. C:\Users\cyand\Google Drive\AI-ChatGPT-Exported-Backups\ChatGPT-export-26th-September-2026.zip

The existing sample provides the layout calibration: 20 pages for 18 conversations, including its title and contents pages."

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Most of that is ChatGPT's verbose replies.

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How Did the Jews Become Monotheists?

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A remarkable feature of ancient Judaism is its monotheism. While the great civilisations of Egypt, Mesopotamia and the Levant maintained elaborate pantheons of gods, the Israelites eventually came to insist that only one God existed.

How radically unusual this was one can see by contrasting it with the religious cultures of the great civilisations of later antiquity: the Greeks and the Romans.

Why did this happen? Was there something about their origins as pastoral herders that encouraged such a belief?

The first surprise is that the Israelites were almost certainly not monotheists before 1000 BCE. Their religion developed out of the polytheistic culture of Canaan, with its family of gods: El, Baal, Asherah and others. Archaeological evidence, including eighth-century BCE inscriptions apparently associating Yahweh with Asherah (Asherah was an important mother goddess in the ancient Canaanite religion, and may once have been regarded as the consort - effectively the wife - of Yahweh by some early Israelites).

Early Jewish religious practice was considerably less orthodox than the later biblical tradition would have us believe.

We need to distinguish three stages: polytheism, acknowledging several gods; monolatry, worshipping one god exclusively while allowing that others might exist; and monotheism, denying the existence of any other gods.

The First Commandment - "You shall have no other gods before me" - expresses monolatry rather than necessarily asserting monotheism. Much of the Old Testament can be read as a sustained campaign to establish Yahweh's exclusive worship against the persistent attraction of other deities.

Why should this campaign have succeeded?

Initially, the process was probably associated with ethnic and political consolidation. Peoples throughout the ancient Near East possessed national gods: the Moabites had Chemosh, the Israelites Yahweh. Exclusive loyalty to Yahweh helped distinguish Israel from its neighbours.

There were political interests involved too. Religious centralisation strengthened Jerusalem's monarchy and priesthood at the expense of provincial shrines and their competing establishments. The reforms attributed to King Josiah in the seventh century BCE, suppressing alternative cults and concentrating worship in Jerusalem, illustrate the point. Religious exclusivity and political authority reinforced each other.

But this still leaves the central puzzle. Other peoples had national gods without concluding that competing gods were imaginary. Why did the Israelites take that additional step?

The decisive development may have been the Babylonian conquest of Judah in 586 BCE. Jerusalem was destroyed, the Temple demolished, and much of the political and religious elite deported to Babylon.

In the conventional ancient Near Eastern understanding, such a catastrophe might signify that Babylon's gods had defeated Yahweh.

The Jewish religious thinkers produced a radically different interpretation.

Yahweh had not been defeated. He had deliberately permitted Judah's destruction as punishment for its disobedience.

This was a theological masterstroke. What appeared to demonstrate the impotence of Israel's God became evidence of his sovereignty. If Yahweh could command the armies of foreign empires, then his authority extended far beyond Israel. He was not simply a national patron but ruler of the entire world.

The transition is explicit in the exilic writings of Isaiah: "I am the LORD, and there is no other; apart from me there is no God" (Isaiah 45:5).

Here, at last, is unambiguous monotheism.

There was also a powerful sociological consequence. A people deprived of sovereignty, territory and Temple could nevertheless preserve its identity through scripture, covenant and religious law. Its God was no longer confined to a particular sanctuary or dependent upon the survival of a particular kingdom.

Pastoral origins may have contributed something to the earlier development of Yahweh worship. But nomadic societies are by no means necessarily monotheistic. The pre-Islamic Arabs, for example, worshipped numerous gods.

An illuminating comparison is Akhenaten's Egypt, where an attempt to establish exclusive worship of the solar deity Aten around 1350 BCE collapsed after the pharaoh's death. Egypt's established priesthood and traditional cults returned.

The contrast is striking. Egyptian religious exclusivism was imposed from above by a powerful ruler - and disappeared when his authority vanished. Jewish monotheism, on the other hand, crystallised among a defeated people and became the means of preserving its identity without political power.

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Note: How numerous were the Israelites at the dawning of their group identity? We are talking about tens of thousands of people, not hundreds or a few thousand. By approximately 1000 BCE, a reasonable archaeological estimate for the population of the emerging Israelite communities is 50,000–60,000 people, distributed among several hundred small settlements. These were generally agricultural and pastoral communities, living in relatively simple houses, growing grain and olives and keeping sheep, goats and cattle.

The important qualification is that these people did not necessarily constitute a unified nation, nor would every inhabitant have possessed a clear, exclusive Israelite identity.

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Why I paused my guitar lessons

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At my guitar lesson last Wednesday, I told Stewart Knight that I wanted to pause the lessons for the time being, even though there were another four or five still scheduled in the current cycle. I gave him what I thought were perfectly sensible reasons, which he was happy to accept.

I've subsequently been reflecting on what really prompted the decision. Understanding one's own motivations is always a hard problem. You know you want to do something, but not necessarily why.

I do have something of a track record here. Over the years I've taken up various activities - Tai Chi, paragliding, karate and piano playing come to mind - pursued them quite seriously for a year or more, achieved a certain level of competence (never mastery, which can take a lifetime), and then quite decisively stopped. (With shotokan karate I had to stop after about ten months and three gradings, because of ever-worsening sciatica: don't get old).

But generally, at some point, I seem to reach an internal target, after which the costs of continuing with formal instruction and its associated commitments outweigh the benefits of further progress.

Is something similar happening with the guitar? I think not.

I've been having lessons for about ten months now, mostly acoustic but with some electric guitar as well. My decision to restart playing seriously dates back about eleven months. So this has not been a passing enthusiasm, and I'm certainly not proposing to give up the guitar.

I note to myself that my desire to play the guitar drove the lessons, rather than the lessons driving my desire to play. Although, inevitably, there is some interaction between the two.

When I started, my particular ambition was to learn fingerstyle blues. This was completely new territory for me. I had no real understanding of the techniques involved, the various styles, or even the shape of the journey towards acquiring the necessary skills.

Ten months later, I'm considerably better informed. I've worked through perhaps 80% of the Fingerstyle Blues Guitar book by Arnie Berle and Mark Galbo, acquired a reasonable understanding of the terrain, and substantially improved my playing.

But I now see two problems immediately ahead of me, both undermining the case for continuing with weekly lessons.

The first is consolidation.

I've acquired a large collection of partial skills: I can stumble through walking bass lines, attempt various vamps as below, pick out melodies and understand, intellectually at least, how to assemble these elements into a recognisable blues performance. I understand intellectually the interaction between the bass and melody lines, the call-and-response structure between guitar and voice, and the different techniques used by the great blues guitarists.

The trouble is that I can't actually do most of it very well.

The familiar problems are all there. Chords are insufficiently precise, chord changes are ragged, the thumb and fingers are nowhere near properly independent, and my ability to play melodic phrases over a continuing bass line remains rudimentary. In practical terms I'm still near the beginning.

But I now know what needs to be done. There are exercises to practise, combinations to experiment with, and skills to develop through sheer repetition. I want the freedom to try this and that, follow up something interesting, or spend a week working on a particular technical problem without worrying about what I'm supposed to be preparing for next Wednesday's lesson.

I'm currently working on this vamp piece...

I need some space to consolidate.

The second problem is deciding where I want to go from here.

Should I develop my singing and learn to accompany myself properly? Should I concentrate on building a repertoire from the classic blues guitarists - Mississippi John Hurt and others from the American South, perhaps moving into Chicago blues? Or should I explore something different altogether?

I have plenty of interests, and at the moment I don't particularly want to commit to just one of them. I would rather explore the possibilities before deciding what deserves sustained attention.

Much the same argument applies to the electric guitar.

Stewart's feedback on my early attempts at the solos in James Shipway's Blues Soloing book has been extremely useful. He could spot technical problems which I had completely missed. But once again, what I principally need now is practice and consolidation. I want to learn more solos, experiment with the amplifier and different tones, improve my picking and playing speed and accuracy, become more fluent in crossing strings, and generally develop the ability to move around the fretboard.

At this stage, I've concluded, I don't particularly need to learn more new things. I need to become better at the things I already encountered.

So I explained to Stewart that I wanted to take some time out from the lessons, consolidate what I'd learnt, explore a few possibilities and perhaps get a little more fun back into playing. The regular lessons, useful though they've been, had become a bit of a treadmill.

He was entirely sympathetic. Indeed, he suggested that in the new year, 2027, I might consider occasional one-off lessons instead. If I have a particular piece I'm working on, or a technical problem where some experienced feedback would be helpful, I can simply arrange to pop round, play what I've been doing and get his advice.

Stewart suggested starting with Lightnin' Hopkins
and Mississippi John Hurt - so my Christmas present?

Sounds good.

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