A couple of ideas banging around in my head today. Let’s see if it makes a point, and a meta-point. Can I do that? Of course I can, dear friends. I’m brilliant.

I was listening to BBC Radio4 this morning. An AI company’s public relations team has managed to pitch a news story: they have processed thousands of words from the actor James “Jimmy” Stewart, he of It’s a Wonderful Life, and produced a simulacram that can read you bedtime stories. The presenters had another writer on – I’ll look him up in a moment – who remarked that the value of a bedtime story is, sometimes, the fact that as a parent you find the book absolutely boring.

My own father will tell me that he soon learned my favourite books by heart. So did I, mind you, because my brain has a special talent for voices and mimicry and sounds. I don’t think he enjoyed the hundredth time we re-read the same book. I don’t imagine there’s as much to plumb, in terms of performance, from We’re Going On a Bear Hunt as there is from Hamlet. He still did it, though.

I have made dinner for my partners many hundreds of time, in my life. I call my parents often, though perhaps not often enough. I say hello to my office’s receptionist and my apartment’s concierge. And these things are boring. And out of these very boring bricks are relationships built.

Frank Cottrel-Boyce. That was the fellow on the radio this morning.

I am writing. I have written – I suspect – many millions of words by this point. I am quite good at it now, and it is by virtue of sitting down and writing. It’s dull. It’s dull, day in and day out. The stuff that happens in the in-between is boring, and without it the whole edifice falls apart. The stuff that’s made me good has mostly been the everyday. The literary equivalent of brushing my teeth. I have good teeth now, good bones. This has good bones.

I am currently working on a piece of programming. It is a radical reconstruction of our infrastructure. It will save us money. It will reduce the complexity of the system. It will make it easier to explain our platform to new developers. It is a thing nobody else could do, because nobody else has done the very boring work of reading everything we have on this thing, and everything the Internet says about it, and everything the sages upon the mountain have written about it. And now it is…effortful, certainly, but not difficult.

AI solves the wrong problem, you see. It wants to jump to the middle part of the relationship, where everything is brilliant. It helps you write better code for the computer. But that’s not what we need, really.

The best part of writing code should be the relationship it represents with your future self; your colleagues; the poor sod who has to debug what you’ve written at 3am. The bedtime story my father read was perfect because through long practice we could read it together. The way I find the milk jug where it should be and the way my partner’s coffee gets better every day: these are the words between the words; the tissue between the muscles; the spaces between the kisses.

They cannot be rushed. They cannot be replaced. They cannot be skipped.