Big kid has been learning about WWII at school. He took in a photo of his great grandfather (my Grandpa on my Dad’s side).

Grandpa Fred was a coder. He was in the Royal Signal Corps decoding Morse code messages from the Nazis. When war broke he tried to join the Royal Navy. Because he knew Morse code from his job at the Post Office they sent him to Scotland. If he’d joined the Atlantic and Arctic conveys he’d very likely have ended up at the bottom of the cold, dark sea, and we wouldn’t be here.

As a teenager, I remember spending hours typing in pages of machine code from computer magazines into my Dragon 32 PC hoping not to make a single error and produce a playable game “Bomber” at the end.

We’re all coding - encoding and decoding - stories that give our lives meaning and purpose.

Weaving our own unique patterns in the fabric of space-time, searching for answers and connections in the world wide web, and gazing at the stars in awe and wonder for millennia.

Using threads from the code of life created by and handed down to us by our ancestors and their ancestors before them since time immemorial.

From cave paintings to fossils and footsteps on the moon, from the Pyramids to the Parthenon and the Pentagon, we’re leaving reminders of our existence, building structures that help us to organise, process and understanding information about our world.

Now we’re coding large language models and training them on the whole of human knowledge and history hoping that they can tell us the meaning of life and/or not destroy us in the hands of our new Nazi overlords, or serve us up tasteless slop.

I’m not sure what Fred would have made of it all. Like my great grandfather Frank before him, he was from another time, conservative, happy with his lot. He loved Oldham Athletic (“Latics”), the Telegraph crossword, driving carefully, and Freemasonry. He wrote letters on a typewriter.

He had all his teeth removed at a relatively young age in a “buy one get them all removed free” kind of too-good-to-be-true offer, and spent the rest of his days struggling to eat food that wasn’t tasteless slop with dentures that never fitted properly. Raw egg mixed with milk and Ribena was a particular favourite, if I remember correctly.

Fred would have loved his great grandkids. It’s a shame they never got to meet.

He would probably have said, “Give over, lad!”