I Take a Side Street

Water, water, everywhere, nor any drop to drink.

On Coleridge, The Ancient Mariner, and the exam-board habit of flattening meaning to the first answer that gets nodded through. Plus: what any of this has to do with search.

Coleridge's own line, and it's doing more work than the tidy classroom gloss — thirst surrounded by the very thing that should quench it — usually gets credit for. Hold that thought. It comes back.

The title's Sean Hughes too, near as I can place it — another half-remembered fragment from the same lost tape as everything else here, which feels like the right way to borrow a line from a man whose best material barely exists in searchable form anymore. Fitting, given what this piece is actually about.

Worth remembering, before any of this gets too pleased with itself: The Simpsons already did the definitive version of this whole problem, and did it funnier. Homer's Enemy — Frank Grimes tricks Homer into entering a children's power-plant design contest, hoping to humiliate him. Homer's entry is a crude copy of the actual plant, fins bolted on for wind resistance, a racing stripe down the side. He wins. Beats Martin Prince, whose genuinely sophisticated model was actually generating the power for the auditorium while the judging happened. Burns's verdict on Martin's: "cold and sterile... where's the heart?" There's a reasonable chance the room just wants fins and a racing stripe. Worth holding both possibilities in your head at once, and not assuming which one you are.

I can't find the exact clip. It might live on a DVD I no longer own, or an old cassette that's long gone, so what follows is reconstructed from memory rather than transcribed — which feels appropriate, because the bit itself was about the gap between what actually happened and what you're told happened.

Typed his name into a streaming service looking for the actual tape, and got about a million results back. Not the tape. Just volume — everything adjacent, everything vaguely matching, the algorithm's best guess at relevance standing in for the one specific thing I was after. Which, it turns out, is the whole argument of this piece before I've even made it.

Sean Hughes, on being taught Wordsworth's Daffodils at school. The accepted answer — the one the exam wanted — was something like: it's about nature, about a moment of simple joy, ten thousand daffodils tossing their heads in the breeze. Hughes' recollection, paraphrased as best I can manage it, was that he was told his reading was wrong. That the poem was actually about something else entirely — the French Revolution, if memory serves — people falling, and returning, generation after generation, like flowers.

Whether that's word-for-word what he said, I couldn't tell you. But that's not really the point. The point is the shape of it: a teacher, or an exam board, deciding in advance what a poem is "about," and marking you down for reading it differently. Perceived wisdom standing in for the actual text.

I heard the same move made recently, in passing, by my nephew-in-law, about Coleridge. "Oh, it's all about nature." Said with the same confidence, the same closed-case tone. And it's not that nature isn't in there — obviously it is, it's soaked into every line — it's that "it's all about nature" is doing the same job the exam board's answer did. It's the version that's easiest to agree on, not necessarily the one that's true.

Which is where it gets interesting

I've been reading Richard Holmes' Coleridge: Early Visions, and there's a pub near where I live called The Ancient Mariner — ship in full sail, gold sun, albatross on the sign — sitting directly opposite the house Coleridge lived in from 1797 onwards. I've stood outside it. The poem isn't an abstraction you inherit secondhand through an exam board or a search snippet; it was written by a man who walked that same stretch of road, and the pub sign is still there arguing the same case the poem does, whether or not anyone reads it as anything more than décor.

And separately I put The Rime of the Ancient Mariner in front of Google's Gemini — deliberately pushing past the first-pass readings it wanted to offer (wedding guest as stand-in for shallow materialism, "things" in the poem as straightforward proto-environmentalism) to see what was underneath if you refused to settle for the tidy version. Worth naming what that first pass actually was, plainly: the reading level of a rushed secondary school English class, the same "it's all about nature" instinct my nephew-in-law had, just running on faster hardware and with better manners. Ask once, get the exam-board answer, dressed up in fluent sentences. Push past it and there's something better underneath — but only if you don't stop at the first thing offered, which is the exact habit this whole piece is arguing against.

The pub sign, it turns out, is a decent map of where that led. Ship in full sail, gold sun behind it, albatross overhead, water beneath dotted with the shapes of land or ice. Everything on that board is connected in one composition — the bird isn't separate from the weather, the ship isn't separate from the sea it's sitting on. That's more or less Coleridge's own "One Life" philosophy, the idea running under the poem that nature isn't a backdrop for human drama but one continuous, animating force that the Mariner is inside of, not looking at. Killing the albatross isn't an environmental crime in the modern sense — there was no concept of that in 1798 — it's a rupture in a single living system he was never separate from to begin with. The "things" he later blesses aren't cute sea-slugs he's grown fond of; they're proof he's reconnected to that continuity. Read it as "be nice to animals" and you get the nature-poem version. Read it as One Life and the wind that finally drives the ship home isn't just weather turning — it's the imagination, or the spirit, picking the Mariner back up once he's stopped holding himself apart from everything else on that sign.

One life, not several stitched together — that's the bit that keeps surfacing in my day job too. Someone moves a server. One action, singular, the kind of thing that gets a single line in a project plan. Except nothing on a website is actually separate from anything else, any more than the bird is separate from the weather in that pub sign. Move the server and the plugins don't migrate cleanly. The plugins not migrating breaks the tracking. The tracking breaking means nobody notices the redirects are wrong for six months. The redirects being wrong is what's actually costing the money, and by the time anyone traces it back, "we moved the server" is three consequences removed from the thing anyone can see. Shoot one albatross, and it's never just the albatross.

None of that is more "correct" than the nature reading. But it's what's there when you don't stop at the first answer that gets nodded through — and maybe that's the actual mistake in how we're taught to read anything: treating meaning like a single drop, one correct reading sitting still and waiting to be identified, rather than a stream. The nature reading, the One Life reading, the Gothic reading, whatever else is in there — they're not competing for the one true drop. They're all moving through the same channel at once, and which one you catch depends on where you happen to be standing when you look.

Which is, funnily enough, closer to how search actually behaves than the tidy "type a query, get the answer" version suggests. A results page isn't a single verdict either. It's a moving current — behaviour, freshness, context, who's asking and from where — reshuffling constantly underneath what looks like a fixed list. Treat either one, a poem or a SERP, as a single settled drop and you'll mistake whatever's on top today for the whole of what's there.

The relevancy problem

Here's the thing about Google, or an AI overview, or any system built to surface "relevant" results: relevance isn't the same as accuracy. It's built on preference — on what most people already believe, already search for, already agree with. That's not a flaw exactly. It's the whole mechanism. If Google stopped reflecting what people actually want, it would stop being useful.

But "what people want" and "what's true" aren't the same thing, and poetry is where that gap shows up cleanly. People want Daffodils to be about nature because that's simple, and pleasant, and doesn't ask anything else of you on a Tuesday afternoon. People want the Ancient Mariner to be a tidy environmental parable because it slots neatly into how we already think about it. The accepted reading isn't a conspiracy. It's just the reading with the most agreement behind it — and agreement isn't evidence.

And here's the bit worth sitting with: the web might be one of the more genuinely democratic things we've built. Search was never authority handed down — it's built on links, which were always a kind of vote, and later on actual behaviour, what people click, what they stay on. That's not a stitch-up, it's closer to the will of the people than most systems that claim the phrase. But getting what most people want doesn't mean getting what's best, or truest, or even what you personally wanted when you went looking. The vote can be entirely fair and you can still walk away short-changed — the way I did typing a comedian's name into a streaming service and getting a million near-misses back. The process wasn't rigged. It just wasn't for me.

Adrift, and not giving a scooby

Here's a detail that gets flattened in the "be nice to nature" reading: the crew don't just watch the albatross get killed. They vote on it, twice, in opposite directions. First they curse the Mariner for it — bad luck, shouldn't have done that. Then the wind picks up and they praise him for it — good riddance, bird was cursing the fog anyway. Then things go wrong and they're back to blaming him, hanging the bird round his neck as the mark of what he did. Same crew, same act, verdict flipping entirely on whichever way the outcome happened to break — never once actually asking whether killing it was sound in the first place.

That's industry consensus in miniature. And the albatross isn't standing in for one specific sin — it's whichever shortcut is currently in fashion: link-buying schemes, spam comments dropped across a thousand blogs for the sake of a backlink, PBNs, content spun thin enough to see through, whatever this quarter's version of the quick win happens to be. The crew don't care which bird gets shot. They care that something's dead and the wind's picked up, and they'll cheer whichever corpse did it — right up until the wind dies again, at which point it's blamed on the exact same corpse, and whoever pulled the trigger is the one left wearing it round their neck, not the crew who talked them into it.

Which is roughly the position the Mariner's in by the end: he doesn't get to tell the story once and be done with it. He's cursed to keep telling it — collaring whoever's nearest, again and again, not because he's chosen to pass on wisdom but because he physically can't stop. That part I recognise more than the mentor angle, if I'm honest. It's less "wise old hand imparting knowledge" and more the specific tiredness of explaining, for what feels like the hundredth time, to a new client or a new hire, why the tag pages shouldn't have been noindexed, why the redirect chain is the reason nothing ranks, why the thing everyone swore was best practice two years ago is the mess you're now being paid to clear up. Not a lecture freely given. A compulsion, because someone has to say it again, and it's landed on you.

He does still corner a Wedding Guest on the way to something more pleasant, though, and hold him there until the story's told properly. That part fits too — nobody comes to a strategy call wanting the migration history. They get it anyway. They leave changed, whether they asked for it or not.

I've done a version of this myself, unpaid and uninvited, more than once — found something genuinely wrong on someone's website, written it up properly, sent it over expecting nothing back. No wedding, no feast, just an inbox. Most of the time it goes exactly where you'd expect an uninvited story to go. Occasionally someone actually stops and reads it. Either way, I keep doing it, which probably says more about me than it does about them.

Turns out it applies to Wordsworth, Coleridge, my own industry, and — knowing Sean Hughes — probably to standup comedy as well.

Water, water, everywhere. Plenty of it moving past, not much of it landing where you meant it to. Which is, in the end, the whole poem in one line, and the whole piece too.

Coleridge has the Mariner stop his listener with a glittering eye — no explanation given for why that one, why this stranger, why now. He just fixes on him, and the man has no choice but to stand still and hear it out. So if you're ever cornered by somebody with that exact look in their eye, about to tell you something you didn't ask to know — there's a fair chance it's me. Water, water, everywhere — and not a pitch to be found.