In a Stefan Zweig short story found amongst his papers at his death in 1942 the narrator meets the world chess champion on a cruise. He also meets a man who spent months in solitary confinement under interrogation by the Gestapo and whose only source of sanity was a book of great chess matches that he had smuggled into his cell.In his head herpeplays classic matches of the Grand Masters hundreds and hundreds of times. Inevitably, the world chess champion and the Gestapo escapee face each other in chess combat.

Nowadays, travel is less exotic. You might not find a world chess champion on a commercial cruise liner. In his place you would find a retired couple who thougth the best way they could spend their well earned cash was browsing through the same international brands, coffee shops and fast food outlets that are available to them in their nearest decent sized town in Bedfordshire or wherever. In place of chess, this retired quantity surveyor and his wife might be hunched over an i-pad or a blackberry.

Today the commercial world requires us to aspire to what is dreadfully, mind-numbingly familiar. The alien has been almost entirely eradicated from the landscape. Even our cinematic escape into Elizabethan London or Regency Cheltenham will have William Shakespeare saying that some wench was “awesome” and Jane Austen as some feisty post-modern feminist with attitude. We have been locked into a new confinement of persistant and tepid familiarity and we have no set of Grand Master duels to escape into.

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Computers in schools are rubbish. They were mass shifted in by naive, chip on the shoulder, middle aged politicians in the 1990s who didn’t understand them and thought they would solve the problem of education. Now pupils do not think, they google; they do not write; they cut and paste; they do not construct essays; they assemble them; they do not think about a mot juste; they pick it from the computer. When I hear the injunction for a child to do some research on line, my heart sinks.

And then we have too much information. It depresses us, slows us down, wastes our time, makes us less creative, punctures every conversation with someone wanting to check something on his smartphone. In the same way as jokes are for people with no sense of humour and Valentine’s Day is for those with no sense of romance, information is for people unable to do conversation.

The silhouette of youngster or oldster bent over a smart phone has become iconic. Like the Madonna and Child or Massacio’s version of th expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise, those shapes you would recognise through a glass darkly; you recognise also the fall of the shoulder of an archetypal browser caught in the flagrante delicto of information retrieval, the emblematic sorry act of the age.

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