stand beguiled by the analogue. Making cupcakes with my kids, I try to explain that the pointer moves in response to the weight of the flour. It’s all cogs and levers and springs, I mutter. And I remember the needle trembling as it entered the red zone on my first car’s speedo, out on the road to the hills, the Crimson album back cover with the danger gauge, my friend’s roaring wreck with its rows of glowing dials and tiny clocks buried in the walnut dash, amp meter, oil pressure, a feast of needles all rising and falling. The same friend with a show on in London tonight, my invitation coded in an email, not sure I can make it in, stretched, self edging into the red. We’re analogue too, I want to say to the bakers, alive to continuous change in the physical world. We’re inexact. But wisely I keep my mouth shut and fetch the caster sugar.
