This morning my wife was uncharacteristically annoyed (not at me!) She had carefully downloaded the O.S. maps “app” to her phone. Gone back to check the orientation, pressed a button and Hey Presto! the entire map series disappeared. She was left with a blank screen showing Nothing. I muttered sympathetically. Which was of no practical use but at least conveyed my sympathy. It happens to me constantly where anything “I.T.” is concerned. I think I must wear a number on my forehead which anything I.T. can read. The technological equivalent of 666. Only in this case a barcode that says “This man is an idiot. He should not be allowed unsupervised access to anything I.T. – my P.C., my phone, my Sat Nav, even my Garmin. They all work perfectly for my friends. I sit down in front of anything “techie” and it acts out.

I recently needed some work done on my Mac. It was getting old and slow. A new machine is about £1K. An upgrade about £150. I went for the upgrade! “It’s much better now” my P.C. man advised me.” I reinstalled X, added Y to the power of 10, tweaked your memory, added 100 times more RAM – and cleaned your filthy keyboard!”

“Thanks” was all I could say. (The only part of the sentence that meant anything to me was “I’ve cleaned your filthy keyboard.”!) I’ve just sat down to write this blog and, Nothing! All my previous shortcuts had gone. Along with passwords and everything else that allowed me to navigate my P.C. in some kind of easy way. (Call me a luddite but what was so bad about a carrier pigeon with a missive written on velum with a quill pen?)

To return to my central theme. Thinking about both my wife’s experience with her phone and my upgraded computer. it seems to me that what we’re seeing are maps of Nowhere. All the data is there – it’s just not easily accessible. I looked up “nowhere” in my dictionary of Etymology, which has never failed me yet. But this time it did. Ironically, there is no entry for “Nowhere”! It is a mystery word. No beginning. No end. It is, to quote an entry I did find “Not in, at or to any place.” Fascinating that such an important word is, seemingly, an orphan.

As I played with this idea of “Nothing” it seemed to be the linguistic equivalent of the idea of Zero, defined as “… something… made out of nothing; or… from removing something.” “Nowhere” seems much the same. It’s what’s left when we remove something. If we’re doing something, then we are “somewhere”. In the garden, driving the car, riding a book. When we are “nowhere” then we are asleep or in a reverie. Just daydreaming. (I think our own “nowheres” approximate to the unconscious.)

We should value our “nowheres” rather than dismissing them as time wasting. Imagine where we would be without our dreams? We need our oasis moments when we just roam free. Out of our “nowheres” come novels, plays, painting, machines, life partners and children. And all that pertains to our creativity. As one writer put it “There’s no such thing as nothing. In every nothing, there’s something. In fact there could be everything.” (Libba Bray)