What kind of choice is it when we merely choose our own access through YouTube or Instagram, through catch-up or fire stick. Anything that might have kept us together now separates us. The water cooler stands in the corner of the office, untouched. The only people who still talk are the smokers, and their conversation invariably turns to death, like the printed messages on their cigarette packets. This is a world without sweet cigarettes, a staple joy from the 1960’s newsagent sweet counter. No promise of the liberating rush of sugared products.

Alan Dacres chooses control over his world, only to find it disintegrating in his hands. When everything is accessible, nothing is too. When you can talk to someone on the other side of the world as if they were in the next room, then that is where they are. Like free thought, travel will become unnecessary. All that will be left is fiction, and soon, untouched by human experience, that too will become banal. The imagination is our last refuge. Whether it is developed by nature or nurture may not matter in the years ahead.

History will be accessed by those who still read, those who let words on a touched page dance in their head.