My mother forgot my son’s name, and as she searched her memory for it, while we were on the phone, as I walked slowly around the Meadows, in the freezing air, I found myself thinking of my first day on the internet, that day so long ago, when I didn’t even know what the internet was, though we had a computer at home, with a number of games on floppy disk, as well as a CD-Rom encyclopaedia which, when I was accepted to grammar school, my mother compelled me to use one day during the summer holidays for research on an ›independent essay‹ she was going to make me write, since I was going to grammar school, on Ancient Egypt, or perhaps just the pyramids, a prospect by which I was both excited – I liked the idea of knowing about Egypt in theory, of being someone who could recite facts about pyramids, the geometrical calculations which made their assembly possible, the symbolic relation between the structure and the environment, the materials used to construct them and the modes of transport used to move such vast quantities of whatever material (my essay was largely a copy-and-paste job) from somewhere far down the Nile all the way to Cairo, though I think I was also slightly fearful of the possibilities such knowledge could foreclose (…).

Oli Hazzard: Lorem Ipsum, London: Prototype Publishing 2021, S. 9.