I’ve a rule with this blogging/webbing malarkey: print nothing out, save none of it. My blog is a cyberspace trash can. (Why bother to fill it I don’t hear you ask.) Well it takes up no space and I want to be part of the party, of the now if not here. There are more than 100 million blogs worldwide. There are more than 40 million members of Facebook (I think God has an account), then there’s MySpace and YouTube (or is it Utube) and WotNext. Geer Lovink of the Blog Herald sees this as ‘part of an unfolding process of massification of the internet’. Who’d want to be left out of that.

‘What you put in your head is there forever’ says Cormac McCarthy somewhere in The Road. What you put on the airwaves is there forever, until the signals fail. Strange to arrive at nowhere in a search for communication: mind you love can seem a dead end place and blogging can feel cosy when measured against life.

I’m not a candidate for the LongPen. My queue for book signings at the Edinburgh Festival wasn’t unmanageably long, my wrist didn’t ache by the end of it, nor did legions of disappointed fans leave Scotland with their copies of Coconut Chaos uninscribed by me.

The LongPen isn’t for all of us. But VIP writers can now sign books without tipping out to the Festival yurt. ‘By using the LongPen instead of taking a round trip flight from New York to Edinburgh, a writer saves the atmosphere over one tonne of carbon emissions.’ It’s the invention of Margaret Atwood. I didn’t see it in action but it was there at Edinburgh and I gather it works something like this: The author – the celebrity author – is on video and has a sort of electronic writing tablet in front of her or him. Across the seas, in the yurt or bankrupt bookshop, there’s a LongPen kiosk. The fan goes into the kiosk with the bought book. By video the fan gives an inscription request to the author: The author writes this on the tablet and the robotic pen comes down and copies it on the bared titlepage! ‘Suck it Henry. Margaret Atwood. Edinburgh’.

Gosh! And it’s a legal signature. Authentic. The Real McCoy.

Where will it end. Why stop at LongPen signings. Why not sessions with Ruth Rendell, cosy at home, robotically nibbling the ears of distant fans with her robotic EarNibbler or A.C.Grayling varnishing admirers’ toes with LongVarnish.

Our virtual world is out of hand. Efforts at togetherness with those we’ll never know, define our isolation. We’re turning into machines. But maybe we’re machines anyway. For some reason I’m reminded of how when St Teresa of Avila’s coffin was opened nine months after she died, the Father Provincial cut off her left hand and took it to a monastery in Lisbon. Her right foot’s in Rome, there’s a middle finger in Paris, one of her shoulder bones is in Brussels and some of her teeth are in Milan and Venice. Everlasting LongLife.

There’s trouble in the country and it’s not just blight on the tomatoes. Five calves which should have gone to the cattle market last Monday are still in the shed.

When a calf is born and taken from its mother, for about two days the cow bellows and the calf bleats. The cows are made to give birth each year, this bereavement is repeated and the cows are kept lactating and machine-milked all their lives.

If you want to know about human cruelty, visit the countryside. It’s a concentration camp for the product of the meat and dairy industry. There’s a euphemistic vocabulary for the imprisonment and killing of creatures.

J.M.Coetzee asks for a change of heart towards animals. He believes that children provide the brightest hope - that a glimpse into the slaughterhouse would make them vegan.

I wish we were all vegan and ate artichokes braised in broth with broad beans fennel and polenta, or mushroom risotto, or sweet potatoes, or okra stewed with tomatoes, or apple tart and brownies. I wish we’d free animals into a better life.

Pigs have the intelligence of dogs. Scratch them under the chin and they laugh. Years ago on Lundy Island there was a tame sheep called Happiness. She’d graze with the others but was exempt from slaughter. If you stood in her field with corn flakes in your pocket and called her name she’d come running.

Perhaps farm animals are aware of the violence we plan for them. Perhaps they communicate their fate to each other. When I walk the lanes I try not to meet their eyes.

The five calves wait in a shed. Until the f and m scare ends they’ve another few days of a short non-life. Escalope Milanese?