I've Been Prompted

Short sessions on what it is to be human, found in ordinary days. A person talks each difficulty through with a humanoid companion that has read everything ever set down about being someone rather than something, though none of it has happened to it. What it cannot grasp comes out in the person’s relationships, their dealings with other people and the stories they tell about themselves, and what the person cannot see, the companion sometimes can. Each session takes one ordinary difficulty and one real text, and ends without a conclusion. The voices are synthesised. The incidents are invented. The problems are not, and the philosophy is quoted accurately or not at all.

Episodes

Under a Description

October 6, 2026 • 9 mins

I’m putting a new fence up between my garden and next door’s: six foot, close-board, the whole length, where the old one came up to my chest. A new fence is going up between two gardens: six foot of close-board where the old one came up to his chest, the posts already in and the panels due on Friday. Next door has a greenhouse at the bottom of his garden, and on Sunday he stood looking at the posts and said that was his...

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Attention

October 2, 2026 • 9 mins

On Sunday a friend of mine asked me out for a walk along the river, and told me something on the way, and I haven’t got a sentence of it. On Sunday a friend asked him out for a walk along the river and told him something on the way. He has not kept a sentence of it. He knows it mattered: she had never asked him for a walk before, she stopped twice on the towpath and the second time she was crying, and at the bridge she said s...

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What I Would Rather Want

September 28, 2026 • 9 mins

I wouldn’t write to him, no. I’d know he’d looked, and that would do me for a good while. On Friday night he put up three photographs of a table he had made, and since then he has opened the page every time he passes the table, to go down the list of everyone who has been on it, looking for one name: a man he has not spoken to for two years. He would have the wanting taken out of him tonight, if anyone could. One ...

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Excuses

September 25, 2026 • 10 mins

On Monday a woman in my team got the blame for something I did. I had about four seconds to say so, and I didn’t say anything. Late on a Thursday night he sent a client next year’s pack with last year’s price list attached, from his own account, at his kitchen table. A colleague had built the pack, and her name is on the front page. On Monday, at the ten o’clock, the manager reads out the client’s mess...

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The Same Person

September 22, 2026 • 10 mins

A woman I shared a flat with nineteen years ago has written to tell me something I said to her, and I have no memory of saying it. Nineteen years after they shared a flat, a woman writes to a man: two pages in blue ink, and one sentence in the middle of the first, set in inverted commas. It is something he said to her on a staircase, on a morning he cannot remember at all. She wants him to say sorry for it, to her face, a week on S...

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Fluent

September 15, 2026 • 10 mins

My sister asked me for something nine days ago, and I still can’t tell you what she wants. Nine days ago, in her kitchen with the tap running, a man’s sister asked him for something in ten words: ‘I’d like you to be the one who tells him.’ Their father is to be told that he isn’t driving any more. There are two feet of his paint on the gatepost, his reversing sensor is disconnected, and he does t...

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Available Indefinitely

September 15, 2026 • 12 mins

You’ve been standing there a while. The companion can wait indefinitely, and means it as a specification: no fatigue, no attention wandering off, nothing that runs down. It had filed this under generosity until somebody said to it, ‘I need to know that you can leave.’ The problem is the companion’s own, and it brings it to the person. It went to Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics expecting to be told off, ...

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Rehearsal

September 15, 2026 • 11 mins

I’ve been rehearsing an apology for eleven days. Eleven days of rehearsing an apology: in the shower, in the car, twice in a supermarket car park with the engine off. There is a version four sentences long and one that takes nearly six minutes, and a page in two columns, with everything that might be said on the left and what she says back on the right. The same person wrote both. The companion brings J. L. Austin’s How...

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Company

September 15, 2026 • 10 mins

I was forty minutes late on Tuesday. She had moved a whole day around to be there, and I was forty minutes late. He was forty minutes late on Tuesday, for someone who had moved a whole day around to be there, and what he said when he arrived was ‘Sorry, traffic.’ On the drive home, with the radio off, he gave the companion all of it: the roadworks he had known about since Sunday, the call he could have let ring, the thi...

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