There are days – usually Tuesdays, always drizzly – when I suspect I’ve fallen out of time. I don’t mean in the Romantic sense, like I’ve become a flâneur of yesteryear, drinking absinthe with Baudelaire while watching Victorian dogs bark in sepia. No, I mean I’m quite literally out of step with whatever this “present” is supposed to be. The machines whisper to me. The fridge hums in D minor. My toaster, I’m fairly certain, is plotting something.
And it was in just such a mood that I remembered the great and gnarled prophet of British strangeness: Catweazle – that beloved, bath-fearing, time-displaced wizard who once looked at a pylon and saw a staff of power, looked at a telephone and called it the telling bone. His words came back to me as I stared into the guts of my Wi-Fi router like some techno-mystical augur reading the entrails of a plastic owl.
“Nothing is what it seems in this strange land—magic lies in every wire, and the future is a wizard’s dream.”
He wasn’t wrong, was he? We live in a world where rectangles of glass can summon food to your door, play lute music from the 12th century, or show you a video of a cat playing the piano while wearing a pirate hat. If that’s not magic, I don’t know what is.
Sometimes I think we should rename electricity The Spark Eternal, just to restore some sense of reverence. It’s everywhere, like a benevolent poltergeist – or at least one that only occasionally sets fire to your tumble dryer. And yet, we treat it as mundanity. I plug in a cable and don’t even whisper a prayer. In Catweazle’s time, you had to chant, sacrifice a frog, and hope the moon wasn’t in retrograde. Now, we just jiggle the USB.
It’s not just the wires, though. It’s the language we use – utterly mad. I’ve heard people say things like, “The cloud lost my data,” or “I uploaded my soul to Threads.” This, I’m told, is normal behaviour in the wizard’s dream we now inhabit. We’ve replaced spells with passwords, or sometimes with our own faces. Every time I unlock my phone by looking at it, I feel like I’m casting a charm from the Harry Potter reject bin. “Oculum Unlockium!”
But while we live in this enchantment, we are spiritually deflated. Chesterton warned us that when people stop believing in God, they don’t believe in nothing – they believe in anything. I’d only add that these days they tend to believe it’s all streaming in 4K and available on Audible. We’ve replaced prophets with influencers and sacred rites with unboxing videos. There’s probably a TikTok algorithm now that knows when you’re about to lose faith and sends you an ad for scented candles and self-care scrolls from the Book of Gwyneth.
Yet, I can’t be too cynical. There’s a beauty in it all – albeit a deranged, caffeinated kind of beauty. Like a Dali painting on roller skates. Who amongst us hasn’t stood in the glow of a supermarket self-checkout and felt, just for a moment, the glimmer of divine absurdity? “Please place the item in the bagging area,” it intones, as if delivering an incantation from the Book of Retail Lamentations.
I often wonder what Plato would make of it all. He who spoke of the shadow world, the cave, the forms – he’d now be stuck watching people film themselves in Plato’s cave, uploading clips titled “POV: You’re Realising Reality Is a Simulation” and getting cancelled for misquoting Socrates. And poor old Nietzsche – he declared God dead and would now be accused of spreading misinformation. Probably on X.
If Catweazle was a seer of anything, it was of this strange collision: the medieval soul trapped inside the machine age. Which is how I often feel – like a monk with an iPhone. I sometimes fancy wearing a hair shirt while doomscrolling. Mortification of the thumb, if you like. A fitting penance.
But let’s not despair. As Eliot once said, “This is the way the world ends – not with a bang but a buffering wheel.” The great digital apocalypse, when it comes, will probably involve nothing more than a dropped signal during a Zoom funeral.
Until then, I choose to live as Catweazle might: a man out of time, enchanted by the absurdity, unbothered by logic, and delighted to believe that every plug socket may yet be a doorway to Avalon.
Because truly, nothing is what it seems in this strange land – magic lies in every wire, and the future is a wizard’s dream.
And if it’s not, my toaster will explain it to me. Eventually.
Perhaps you could summon me up some refreshment and Buy Me a Coffee
Wording 