Autonomy

Is the name of a search product which I am sure I have mentioned before, perhaps on the occasion of HP working out that they had paid rather too much for it, but which I cannot now turn up using blog search, with neither of the two hits for 'autonomy' in the other place being relevant.

It was also the subject of this morning's waking musings. So autonomy is something that many of us aspire to at the time we are becoming adults and which in my case meant that for a few months I was drifting about, more or less living out of a suitcase - this being before the days of plastic and one only had a Post Office book for emergencies. Maybe travelers (the sort mentioned on 23rd February) never grow out of this phase and have a life-long aversion to being tied down to places and, maybe, to people.

Now much older, the muse this morning was that autonomy has declined with the passing of time. So, at one level, the idea of moving house is pretty horrific. Then, again when young, some of us dream idly about the joys of self-sufficiency and living on a croft in the west of Ireland or the north of Scotland. But now, loss of electricity (under the control of the French), of gas (under the control of Russians & Arabs) or of water (under the control of Australians. See the helpful OFT spreadsheet copied to https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/8152054/water-ownership-database.xls) all seems scarily likely, at least at some time or another. Can we really trust this lot to keep the taps open? And scaribility does seem to increase with age: I remember tales of older people, people that is not that much older than me, turning their kitchens into fortresses and living in trembling fear of burglars and worse.

If my computer breaks down, I have to send to China for a new one. And the Chinese also make an awful lot of the communications infrastructure over which this post has to fly. Including security aspects thereof.

And then I was told (by someone who ought to know) that we now have no serious explosive making capability left in this country. If we were suddenly to need munitions for a serious war and our usual supply were cut off, it might take a long time to reinstate that serious manufacturing capability. The poor old Scots, if they go for independence, would have no chance. And what chance a battleship? Where would we go for one of those?

And furthermore, I am now on daily medication and interruptions in supply might have untoward consequences.

Depending on one's mood at the time, all this dependence, all this loss of autonomy, can be a bit scary. On the other hand, all this interdependence is a force for world peace. We are all far too interdependent for a serious row to be a very good idea - so provided the lunatics don't get to run the asylum, we should be OK.