Caroline Gold

When it comes to adventures in retail, nighttime shopping is where it all happens: the unusual and most interesting people, the prime parking spaces, the lack of queues and, best of all, the absence of germy, screamy, bored, needy, naggy children. Shopping at night is plentiful in the sticks where I live – the sticks being that area between the outer suburbs and Home Counties proper. It is where you can find both stretches of heath and woodland and still get a decent coffee, speciality breads, etc. Retail parks are open until 8, 9, or even 10, and two epic 24-hour superstores are a mere zoom away in my old car.

I am a procrastinator: a time-waster, a faffer-about, an idler, a vacillator. A self-loathing, self-sabotaging masochist grappling with that mad parody of perfectionism, which leads, instead of efficiency, to neglect, apathy, inertia, distraction, and great pain. It is irrational but irresistible. It is to time-keeping the greatest false economy since the finances of the Weimar Republic. Most people procrastinate to an extent, delaying gratification in things that are not professional – paperwork, loading the washing machine, emptying the dishwasher. The only people I have ever known who did not even do that were my parents, both examples of the war generation.

My first brush with Artificial Intelligence was the Furby – that hideous speaking Gonk with eyes that blinked. You could hear the cogs turning. It felt basic, even for the 2000s. My techie ex got it for me as a birthday present. Like babies, this infant technology responded to clapping. It was weird and dull. Having exhausted its repertoire, I discarded it beside the sofa. One night, weeks later, we were sitting together and heard the whirr of its eyes opening, and it just said, the once, clearly in its strange little voice, ‘Boring’. We laughed. That was as good as it got. Alexa is not sexy like my old satnav, who sounded like Joanna Lumley as a bored dominatrix Alexa, though, is the real deal: my android in a can, my useful housemate. I consult her often.