my teachers said ceramic engine blocks would transform auto design and make switching devices like tap valves last for decades. They said I’d have to adjust to the Age of Leisure before I hit thirty. They said lots of things. But foregone conclusions reef on unanticipated elements. My bib tap started juddering and spurting last week, the ceramic valve was failing. The maker sent me a new one and I fitted it. In the Leisure Age some robot would have done it for me but the robots are a long way off and I have a spanner and screwdriver. I autopsied the old valve and it looked to me that the base ring had come loose – metal fatigue? 7000 openings at a guess. My car’s just cleared 150.000 miles. How long do things last? Banks said he was unlucky, got hit by a rogue cosmic ray that started the cell mutation that killed him with inoperable cancer. It’s Lucretius and the falling atoms, there might be a ray zipping across the black gap of space right now that’s on course to pass through me and flip the cells into anarchy. Sentience is just along for the ride.