The Bayou Tapestry

This morning, I was complaining to ChatGPT that my sleep tracker is a liar.

This may be slightly unfair. It is a small device strapped to my wrist attempting to deduce whether I am unconscious from movement, heart rate and whatever other arcane signals Samsung has persuaded it can interpret. It cannot actually see me lying in bed listening to a podcast.

Unfortunately, this does not prevent it from having opinions.

Yesterday it announced that my sleep latency was two hours and forty-seven minutes.

This was bullshit.

I had been lying in bed listening to a book.

Apparently, as far as my watch was concerned, I had spent nearly three hours desperately attempting to sleep while staring into the darkness and contemplating my life choices.

In reality, I was quite happily listening to someone else’s life choices.

Last night it went in the opposite direction and announced that I had fallen asleep in two minutes.

Also bullshit.

I know this because I fell asleep halfway through an episode of Betwixt the Sheets about the…

You know.

The tapestry.

The famous one.

1066

William the Conqueror.

Little embroidered horses.

The Bayou Tapestry.

More importantly, I was demonstrably conscious for a reasonable chunk of the episode because I woke up having learned two things: it isn’t actually a tapestry and it probably wasn’t made in Bayeux.

I had successfully retained the historical information.

I had not, unfortunately, retained the spelling of Bayeux.

My brain had kept the Norman Conquest, the embroidery technique and the disputed place of creation, then apparently looked at the filename and gone:

Eh. Bayou will do.

And so, sometime during the night, the Norman Conquest was relocated from northern France to Louisiana.

The irritating thing is that I knew perfectly well what I meant. I could see the bloody thing in my head. I knew what it was about. There were Normans and Saxons and Harold and an extremely unfortunate incident involving an eye.

I simply could not, for the life of me, remember how to spell Bayeux.

So my brain did what brains do when presented with an incomplete piece of information.

It filled in the gap.

Confidently.

Incorrectly.

Bayou.

Yes. That looks right.

Presumably William the Conqueror is now advancing through the swamps in a small boat while an alligator lurks beneath an embroidered tree.

I mentioned this to ChatGPT, which was considerably more entertained by the Bayou Tapestry than was strictly necessary.

And then things got worse.

Because, as my apparently awake brain had already absorbed from the podcast, the Bayeux Tapestry isn’t actually a tapestry.

It is embroidery.

This feels unreasonable.

A tapestry is woven as part of the fabric itself. The Bayeux Tapestry consists of wool thread embroidered onto linen.

Fine.

So at least it was made in Bayeux.

No.

Apparently probably not.

The prevailing view is that it was most likely made in England, quite possibly in Canterbury, and then ended up in Bayeux.

Excellent.

So, to recap:

It is called the Bayeux Tapestry.

It probably wasn’t made in Bayeux.

It isn’t a tapestry.

My watch thinks I was asleep while I was learning these facts.

And this morning I couldn’t remember the word Bayeux anyway and accidentally sent the entire thing to Louisiana.

At this point I feel my version has at least as much claim to legitimacy as anyone else’s.

There is, underneath all of this, something rather delightful about how confidently we name things.

My watch looks at a collection of signals from my wrist and declares:

SLEEP LATENCY: TWO MINUTES.

Historians look at seventy-ish metres of medieval embroidery and say:

THE BAYEUX TAPESTRY.

My half-awake brain rummages through its filing cabinet, fails to find Bayeux, discovers bayou sitting approximately three folders away and announces:

CLOSE ENOUGH.

And perhaps that is the bit I find funniest.

We like labels because they make the world feel tidy.

A number tells us how well we slept.

A name tells us what an object is.

A category tells us where something belongs.

Except sometimes the number is nonsense, the tapestry isn’t a tapestry and France has been temporarily annexed by Louisiana because I couldn’t remember how to spell a six-letter word.

The label isn’t the thing.

Sometimes it’s just the best approximation somebody came up with and everybody else agreed to keep using.

Sometimes your watch has inferred it from your wrist.

Sometimes your brain has lost the correct folder.

And sometimes there are alligators.

Anyway, I apparently slept quite well.

My watch says so.

I remain sceptical. 🐧