There's maybe fifty of us in there. It feels like five hundred. Whatever play was on would always devolve into pantomime on that stage. I can see my Dad up there, some silly character. Some of my mates Dad's too who I vaguely knew worked in London most the week and most weekends were now, impossibly, here. I remember one of them - maybe a pirate, maybe an ugly sister - whatever he was, he was in a wig. Shouldn't it have been us up there? After all - we were the ten year olds? West Horsley village hall was small. Really small. It certainly made it easy to own the stage. Regardless, we were all having uproarious fun.

I feel this incredible desire to leave my mark on the world. But then I look at the world. Its covered in marks. So I am left with vague memories of the village hall of the town I grew up in. People were acting; some well, others, well. I felt a deep sense of communion with this cramped room. Sitting in-between plastic chairs crammed beside family and some other kids I'd probably go outside and kick a football with at intermission in the freezing cold. Hopefully I wouldn't be in goal and have to come back in all muddy.

The whole time hands across the room flew up to wave to the family member tentatively entering stage left, his face marked by that embarrassed pride that comes as the result of being at once very loved and very self-conscious. Then some young lady will stand up, she'll deliver a few lines from this old play they're enacting. And the room will fall silent. Because while she had stood in her room learning them, they changed her. Now, maybe, they'll change some of us. The hilarious dullness of her troupe-mates talent will make this moment stand out like looking at a diamond. Everyone will sit still for a moment as it ends. Realising that they'd all been holding their breaths only once the collective sigh releases.

I imagine that the best thing that will come of us crossing the uncanny valley, where you can no longer trust what you see online, is that it will return us to the village halls we came from. Perfectly calibrated content, trumped by the amateurish and awkward - the human embodiment of human experience in real time.

I hope that art will do what it must and aid us in connecting with one another, but I'm grateful that even bad art, earnestly delivered, will leave its mark.