Oo-de-lally

I would love to have something – anything – insightful to say about anything – something – but such thoughts as I have are seldom more than flotsam & jetsam (the long-absent Crispin Underfelt once explained to me the difference between them and if you were to contact him – mayhap with a plea to get his sorry ass back on this platform more regularly – I am sure he would probably do the same for you) tossed on the seething froth of the storm-lashed waters that slosh between my ears. Sadly, I do not. If I’m honest, I find it hard to believe that I have anything to say that has not been said, let alone thought, by somebody before me. Check out virtually any memorable saying and its notable sayer on the internet and you will almost certainly find out that somebody else actually said it first.

I am a little tawdry in my reading habits. My ‘schedule’ is easily deflected at the whim of wife, children, grandchildren, sunshine, peanuts and cider, anything that pricks at my curiosity. I often tune in to my favourite blogs some days late and I find them with dozens of comments already attached. I tend to briefly scan them for names I know and add my own few words before inevitably finding out that somebody else has said first, exactly what I have said second only seconds before. Great minds may well think alike, but mediocre ones clearly get there in second place. Witty asides appear somewhat less witty when a greater wit has made them first.

I should, obviously, read all the other comments before I throw in my own tuppence a’penny but I tend to read the post and comment before it occurs to me. Besides, it’s particularly dispiriting to find that you cannot find anything to say that hasn’t already been said. Occasionally I manage to take a breath and I find myself commenting on the comments of others – usually only to find that somebody else has done that before me too.

It is often said that there is no such thing as original thought: that everything has been thought before, but surely, at some point, somebody must have been the first to have thought it. Also, how could any man have ever thought to himself “I’ll have to watch myself with that,” before e.g. the zip fly had even been invented? And, I’m guessing here, but doesn’t it stand to reason that somebody must have been the first to suspect that cryptomnesia was a thing? The thought that I could have heard something before and then forgotten about it to a sufficient extent that I could say the self-same thing myself, believing that I was the first person to do so, would be a little hard to swallow if I wasn’t aware of how quickly I can forget what I had for breakfast this morning.

My point is, of course (oh yes, there is one) that everything I write is suddenly taking me twice as long as once it did, riven as I am, with doubts over its provenance. Who might have said it first, who might have said it better? So I have decided that I will not believe in cryptomnesia (if I don’t believe in it, it does not, of course, exist) – it is the only way for me to get things done – it is one small step for a man…

When invited to consider my favourite Disney song on a blog some time ago, I instantly remembered this one from Robin Hood. I have no idea why it lodged in my head, but the title has been with me ever since, so – despite it having no relevance whatsoever to today’s fol-de-rol (or does it?), I thought I’d use it here…

Reminiscing this and that and having such a good time
Oo-de-lally, oo-de-lally, golly, what a day… Oo-de-lally – Roger Miller

Wednesday Written All Over It

It was, I will admit, a week or two ago now, but I wrote, as I always do, three posts for the week. I liked them all – otherwise they would not have been published – but I thought that Wednesday’s was by far the best. A bit of a corker, I thought, destined to push my daily readership up into the teens. It therefore came as absolutely no surprise to discover that whilst Monday and Friday attracted what can only be described as a satisfactorily meagre amount of readers, Wednesday scored in the pitiful. I don’t know how much of an effect such things have but Wednesday’s post was a) about the dentist and b) featured a photograph of a dentist invading a mouth in – for a dentophobic such as me – a most unseemly manner which, now I come to think about it, would almost certainly put me off reading on. Perhaps, going forward, I need to be more mindful of the photo’s I graft on to each post. Perhaps I should avoid anything that hints at pain or discomfort, possibly I should head each post with chocolate. Maybe my readership is looking for something from me that I have never considered. Like Unicorns. I’ll consider it now…

Meanwhile, while mulling it over and in preparation for the big move I have spent the day – employing the technical jargon of the initiated – doing stuff. Should you wish to know, it turns out that downsizing involves either painting everything that does not run away, or selling it, with a view to replacing it with something smaller, but infinitely more expensive. I am not a fan of either alternative. I have always been a bit of a make and mender, but I’m also aware that whatever fashion dictates gets painted this year will also need to be unpainted twelve months hence. We need to get rid of the big dining table because we will have far less room. We’ll replace it with a smaller one, although it will need to expand into a bigger one when everybody comes around…

It is a concern obviously, this having less space business, but putting less crap into the space we do have, it appears to me, offers the possibility of a solution. I am wrong, of course. Tacking a bit more space onto the diminished habitat is the answer. I am of a very cautious generation. My wife, who is a similar age, is from an entirely different generation. Sometimes a different planet. I dread the thought that I will not be able to afford things (food, for instance) as I get older; my wife dreads the thought that she cannot do stuff now. I’m sure that she is probably correct. I’m sorry Mr Hartley* but it is tomorrow that is the foreign country. I’ve tried to burn my passport, but it is all in The Cloud now. I fear I shall have to go.

Life, they say, is not about the destination, it is about the journey. Well, seeing as few of us ever want to reach that particular – and ultimate – destination, it is a natural enough conclusion to draw except – let’s be honest – when you’re on your way to somewhere exotic – we’ll say Skegness – the journey is just the bit that stops you being there now. It is just a set of obstacles, a line of hurdles to trip over, and maybe that’s the way that blogging works. Monday is full of promise and Friday filled with the joy of arrival. In between it’s just bloody Wednesday. This post has got Wednesday written all over it…

*”The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.” L.P. Hartley – ‘The Go-Between’

A Bus Trip to Saginaw

…Also you may have noticed – though I really couldn’t blame you if you haven’t – that I have now taken the decision to no longer try to massage this whole fol-de-rol into any kind of order that speaks of a chronology that most certainly was not there at the time of writing. Currently I publish in exactly the same order (although seldom on the same day) as the posts were written and hang the consequences.

Not, of course, that there are any. In the past I have fully embraced the opportunity to muck about with chronology. I would love to feel the need to call upon the services of an adept continuity expert, but frankly I cannot envisage a bigger waste of time (well I can, but I never interfere in the politics of our nation’s allies). My life bounces around like the ballbearing in a pinball machine: it may go forward, backward, sideways, or it might disappear down a hole and ping out again where you least expect it. It may, or may not, elude the flippers.

That is not to say that my day-to-day existence is by any normal criteria chaotic. It chugs along its normal, humdrum, predictable path whilst my brain is bent on taking a rather more… eccentric route…

I sat on the bus today – it is something I have taken to doing with a frightening regularity since retirement: it is unmatched in its potential for mental jerks – and I couldn’t move Paul Simon’s ‘America’ from my head. I’m not sure why: there was nobody wearing a gabardine suit, and not a bowtie in sight. It’s possible that all the bus-pass holders sitting in front of me were spies, but it’s difficult to say because they all got off at the Park & Ride. “Was it something we said?” asked the only other person left on the bus with me. I grinned sheepishly. She appeared sane, but you never can tell on buses. It is never advisable to become embroiled in conversations willy-nilly. My phone was dead and so it could not tell me where Saginaw was. (Since getting home I have, of course, looked it up. Saginaw is a city in Michigan. It stands on the Saginaw river. It was originally inhabited by the Anishnabeg people and is most famous for being mentioned in the song ‘America’ by Simon & Garfunkel.) Mrs Wagner’s Pies were single-serving pies sold in waxed paper and were also best known for being in the song ‘America’ by Simon & Garfunkel. I tried to recall exactly what it was that Art Garfunkel brought to the Simon & Garfunkel party, but I stalled at ‘curly hair’. Paul Simon is a giant of a singer/songwriter, whilst Art Garfunkel sang that song about rabbits…

Which took me on to double acts of all kinds. How often performers huddle together for comfort in the early years of the search for fame and learn to despise one another when they get it. How often one part of the pairing is known to be ‘the talent’ and how much the other partner grows to resent it. How often acrimony replaces love, and ambition replaces joy. Even Laurel and Hardy had periods of tension. And then I thought of Sons of the Desert and the world felt very much the better for it… and for everything they left it.

And the only reason I even mention it is that some weeks nothing happens for days on end and when that happens, all you get is, well, this…

“Let us be lovers, we’ll marry our fortunes together
I’ve got some real estate here in my bag”
So we bought a pack of cigarettes and Mrs. Wagner pies
And walked off to look for America

“Kathy”, I said as we boarded a Greyhound in Pittsburgh
“Michigan seems like a dream to me now”
It took me four days to hitchhike from Saginaw
I’ve gone to look for America

Laughing on the bus
Playing games with the faces
She said the man in the gabardine suit was a spy
I said “Be careful, his bowtie is really a camera… America – Paul Simon

A Little Fiction – Dramatis Personae

Before you begin to write a new character into a novel or screenplay, it is important that you have begun to understand their back story…

…He stood five feet six in his stockinged feet. When he wasn’t wearing his stockings, he was exactly the same size. They made absolutely no difference. I don’t know why I even mentioned them. His face, which in his prime had looked lived-in, now looked as if someone had died there. As a baby, not even his mother would kiss him, in case it was catching. She had the word ‘Top’ stencilled onto his forehead on the day that he was born, so that she knew which end to put the nappy on. His father had left home the very moment that James (Jimmy) Riddle was born, saying ‘That cannot be mine.’ He never returned, which was a great relief to Jimmy’s mother, as she had no real idea of who he was. He had just appeared in her bed one hungover morning, where he remained for nine months, rising only to attend to his toilet needs and to empty the traps.

Jimmy was raised on the bottle. It was not that his mother was unable to breastfeed him, rather that, having had a strict convent education, she refused to remove her vest for anything lower than a cardinal. Furthermore, the preparation of formula milk required a much higher level of culinary skill than she possessed, so she opted instead for bottled Guinness on which to raise the child, with the result that Jimmy did not experience a single day of sobriety until the age of two, at which time he was introduced to Kentucky Fried Entrails – a rather less-than-successful venture undertaken by Colonel Sanders’ younger brother, Orbital – which was to become his staple diet for the next sixteen years and which, coupled with his continued consumption of eight bottles of Ireland’s finest per day, ensured that he was a boy without friends.

School became a hurdle that little Riddle could not overcome. Academia was a place that had bolted its doors, put a chair up against the handle and covered the keyhole lest he should attempt to peek inside. Shunned by fellow pupils and teachers alike, he was instructed to stand in the corner of the classroom even during playtime, when the other pupils used him as a wicket. He tried to make friends by becoming ‘the class clown’, but he discovered that he was too much like a classic French bouffon, in that nobody found him even in the faintest bit funny. He was caned on an almost daily basis by the Headmaster. Not because he had done anything wrong, but because they both rather liked the routine. The Headmaster was, in fact, the only person in the entire school to ever ‘see anything’ in young James – but charges were never brought.

He left school at the age of thirteen and decided to join the Navy, despite being allergic to water. It was not a problem, the recruiting officer assured him. He would be given a stout pair of boots to wear on board ship. If ever the water began to lap over the top of them, that might be considered an appropriate time to panic. In fact, the three years he spent aboard the nuclear submarine as Acting Latrine Orderly (second class) were the best of his life. Although he was shunned by the rest of the crew, the lack of basic facilities on board ensured that he did, at least, smell like everybody else. He became a valued member of the ship’s company and although nobody tacitly acknowledged his presence on board, it became the accepted thing to leave him some portion of unused rations on the seat as a ‘thank you’ after particularly explosive episodes.

It was the death of his mother – ironically with a cold on the chest – that brought him back to dry land. She had always told him that he would get what was coming to him when she died – and she was true to her word. The combined might of the Debt Collectors of seven counties made sure of it. He emerged from their ministrations looking like Michael Flatley had hoofed his way through an entire River Dance on the bridge of his nose. He had never been an oil painting, but now he looked like a Jackson Pollock – one of which, incidentally, the debt collectors had also stood on. He was motherless, homeless, penniless, and his ointment had all but run out. A silent rage flooded though him. He felt impotent – which indeed he might well now have been – and useless. His view of the world had changed. It was to be despised, along with everyone in it. He would never know the joy of befriending a bus conductor. He would never enjoy the thrill of love. He would never own a budgerigar called Bryan. Jimmy Riddle stared into the world and prepared to cast himself out from within it. He carried his impetigo before him like a shield. His weapon was an unwashed body and breath that could strip paint. Two weapons. He strode out of the door with his head held high – which was a shame, because it had a very low lintel…

Well, that’s sorted the romantic hero out, now for the heroine…

First published 21.11.2020

Just silly…

You Can Call Me AI

So, following on from the decision of a few weeks ago to become a little more l’aissez faire with my post titles, I decided that I should also become a little more… proactive – possibly… with the way in which I choose the pictures that accompany them. I decided to employ the AI picture assistant that is now inbuilt into WordPress and gave myself a few ‘headlines’ from the piece I had just written – later to become Manifesto – and approached AI with them. I had ‘catching oneself off-balance’, ‘mirror’, ‘face’ and ‘beard’ but, being a novice in these things, I accidentally hit something or another that threw everything into action after typing in just the first one and the picture at the top of this page is what I got. Does it shout catching oneself off-balance to you? Can anyone whose cognitive processes are not powered by silicon please explain?

You see, giving a phrase to a machine in order to produce an image should be straightforward, shouldn’t it? It’s what we all do, after all: bash together a few hundred words into assorted phrases and leave it to the minds of others to cobble together some sort of coherent image. But our new friend AI managed to come up with something altogether disconnected and it made me think about how similarly disconnected its decision-making protocols might be when faced with the kind of quandaries that might, in the none-too-distant future be life altering (or, indeed, ending). Will the answers they give pose even more questions? Of course they will, that is what answers do.

I am sure you will all be familiar with the (possibly apocryphal, but who’s prepared to risk it?) tale of twenty AI each given a simple task to carry out to the very best of their abilities (You will have to forgive any tortured syntax in what is below, above and possibly all around: I have always found non-gendered pronouns so difficult. Is ‘they’ singular followed by ‘is’ or ‘are’?) one of them, to my recollection, was simply to amass the greatest stamp collection in the world. Whatever they were charged with, they all eventually reached the same conclusion: the only way that they could ever fully fulfil their purpose required the eradication of the human race. Well, it has to be a bit of a worry, doesn’t it? We humans can never be relied upon to behave in a wholly logical manner and when AI is attempting to navigate solutions based solely on logical processes, the kind of idiots who will do anything for love (although, obviously, not that) really need to be exterminated. Let’s face it, no matter how bright these machines are, they can never fully understand us. We are a species in which 50% of us are totally infatuated with something the other 50% of us (being the half that has to tote them around with them) consider as something of an encumbrance, especially when forced to run without the benefit of a sports bra. (Yes, of course I’m talking breasts – which makes a bit of a change from what I normally talk.) What is there for a bunch of electrical circuits to trust? (I have mulled the problem of this human condition on many occasions and I have reached the conclusion that the best solution might be for science to figure out a way of fitting us all with a bosom, although I have to be honest, you would never get most men out of the bath…)

And now I’ve started wondering: what if there are male and female AI? Would their decisions be different? Would half of them have unfathomable (to the other half) mood swings? Would the other half be total arses all of the time?

I’ve thought it through: the answer is obviously a glassful of coloured oils…

None of the opinions expressed (above) are necessarily my own. You decide…

If you’d be my bodyguard
I can be your long-lost pal
I can call you Betty
And Betty when you call me
You can call me Al… You Can Call Me Al – Paul Simon

Whatever’s For Certain’s For Sure

It’s as close as things come to a nailed-on certainty: several days of unbroken sunshine tempts me into making preparations for an all-day outside task and bingo! down comes the rain. Light rain according to the BBC, which may well be right, but in sufficient volume to double my weight within five minutes and leave me wet to the lights. It’s a strange thing about age; I’m sure that you get less waterproof as you get older. Jump into puddles as a kid and the worst I expected was a clip around the ear for getting my socks muddy. Jump into a muddy puddle now and I find myself drowning through the soles of my feet. The water somehow leaches up to my armpits. When sunshine follows a rainy day I am accompanied by fog where’er I go. Not, of course, that today’s children would expect a clip around the ear. Not unless their parents fancied a spell spent at His Majesty’s Pleasure, sleeping on a metal bunk bed, crapping in an enamel bucket and fending off the amorous advances of a Latvian mobster roommate. Times have changed for the better (less so if you want to see eg a dentist without paying through the nose for the privilege.) But, I digress. (Not an aside, but a singular statement of fact. It is what I do for a couple of thousand words a week. If I’m honest I don’t even need anything particular to digress from…)

Anyway, the weather cleared later in the day and the sun came out just long enough to burn any small area of skin I had been foolhardy enough to have left exposed. My task du jour was duly completed to my usual high standard and the next-door neighbour will return my hammer as soon as he stops laughing. I live to fight another day, although I was never much of a fighter in the first place. Losing was my speciality: traipsing home with a fat lip and the vague feeling that the only way I ever would have laid a glove on my assailant would have involved waiting until they fell asleep and then crawling out from under my stone. I have been a lily-livered liberal all my life, if only because I love alliteration and I am not keen on the alternatives offered up by being conservative. Which is, of course, beside the point. The point being that whatever learned opinion is currently made available to me, it is inevitably wrong. I check the weather app on my phone, lather myself in sun cream based upon its unequivocal advice and find myself knee-deep in hail with all outer extremities turning a very fetching shade of blue. Alternatively I deliberately nay-say the technology and – assuming it to be completely wrong – go out in three layers of something woollen, a jacket with a tog-rating higher than my age and a hand-knitted balaclava, whence I will contract the kind of heat-stroke that will have me seeing Andy Pandy on the TV, young people giving up their seats on the bus and bobbies on the beat again.

It was all by the by because, after all, the app did warn of rain – at least it said there was a 50% chance, which I took to mean maybe it would, maybe it wouldn’t – and it was simply my own capacity to absorb it in such volume that had been unforeseen. The fact that my once water-repellent dermis had over the course of forty years, in response no doubt to climate change that will, we are told, precipitate drought/flooding/neither or both (look out of the window and delete as appropriate), evolved to soak it up like blotting paper. Not, I expect, that one is able to buy blotting paper these days. Reserved for royalty and heads of state I suppose: anyone who habitually signs stuff with a fountain pen rather than the click of a mouse. And there’s no point in moaning about it all; things will, as they inevitably do, become irretrievably worse. It’s pretty much a nailed-on certainty…

In Memoriam Meliorum Dierum

I took my grandson to The Bomber Command Memorial in Lincoln* today. His great-grandad was shot down and held as a prisoner of war in Poland from where he escaped in the latter months of the war. He went to his grave having rarely ever spoken about any of it. My grandson, unfortunately, never met him, but he knows his story and he often asks questions about him. The Memorial is an impressive monument, perched on top of a hill overlooking the most beautiful building in the world, Lincoln Cathedral¹ – a sight which told many wartime airmen they had made it home. Visiting the ‘museum’ that stands alongside the memorial is a sobering experience: a reminder of the extreme fragility of life; the unbelievable bravery of thousands of young men who flew in defence of the free world despite understanding that their chances of survival were minimal; it is a difficult reminder that dreadful ‘crimes’ can be committed by brave honourable people for all the right reasons. The statistics dotted around the place are terrifyingly stark, the stories bleak and, around the monument itself, the thousands of names pierced into austere metal panels are like a punch to the heart, but the sun was shining, my grandson ‘got’ the whole thing and it was a beautiful, peaceful place to be.

We left after a couple of hours – a lifetime to my grandson – to find the car park full of Vintage Cars that he happily agreed to be photographed against – he is nine and posing for photo’s is usually beyond lame – until they started to drive away, at which point we too left to buy and eat some chips on a nearby village green. My grandson – let’s call him Cecil² – informed me in his school teacher voice that he felt certain he should have some protein with his chips and he opted for a battered sausage, which he kept on his little cardboard tray for literally seconds before dropping it on the floor. Never mind. We sat on a bench in the sunshine and ate our chips before taking a stroll along the village beck, where I was eventually able to persuade him that going in, fully clothed, was not a great idea…

We went home for an ice cream then, at which point he decided that he would learn how to solve a Rubik’s Cube. He assured me that it would take twenty minutes. Four hours later it remained stoically unsolved and he equally determined. Cecil is a fizzing mass of energy; he seldom sits still. His mind whizzes onto the next thing long before the current one is completed. He seldom finishes anything… unless it is an impossibly complicated Lego construction, a pencil plan of his latest invention or, as it goes, a Rubik’s Cube. When he’s determined to finish something, he is really determined. When he has learned to do it (and he will) he will be equally determined to pass the knowledge on. I confidently predict that I will very soon be able to solve the Rubik’s Cube³. As a legacy left for the world it might not be much. I don’t suppose it will get my name on a monument wall, and I can be nothing but grateful for that…

*Lincoln was at the centre of ‘Bomber County’ in the Second World War. Lincolnshire was filled with airfields, most of them temporary, from where thousands of airplanes flew each night and hundreds returned.

¹This is an incontrovertible fact. Having seen almost none of its competition, I am utterly convinced of it.

²Quite definitely not his real name.

³At the time of writing, he now can and I still can’t…

A Little Fiction – Journey’s End

Craft Lander stared down at the panel of flashing lights before him in a state of quietly suppressed panic. His head was pounding; he could hear the blood pumping through his arteries; his stomach was preparing to repel all boarders. He stared out of the giant windows at a fast approaching dot surrounded by the vastness of the universe and decided that a reappraisal of his heretofore thoroughly reliable belief systems might just be advisable.

“Well?” asked the taller of the two women who stood at his shoulder, ‘What are you going to do?”

“I truly have,” he replied, “not the faintest idea.”

“But,” interjected the shorter woman, adjusting her visor slightly so that the maker’s logo did not block her view, “the message on the screen says ‘Prepare the craft for landing’”

“I can see that,” replied Craft.

“And you,” continued the woman in the visor, “are the Craft Lander.”

“No!” snapped Craft, rising panic beginning to feed his defiance. “I am Craft Lander, eldest son of Craft Lander, first born grandson of Craft Lander etc etc and so forth. I am Craft Lander; plain Craft Lander. I am not THE Craft Lander. I have absolutely no idea how to land this craft. I had no idea that it would ever need landing. Until just now, when you brought me up here, I had no idea that it was, in fact, a craft. I thought that it was just where we lived. There are thousands of us – surely we can’t all live aboard a craft.”

“But you have the sacred scroll,” countered the woman who was, quite frankly, really starting to irritate Craft, “and you are, therefore, the chosen Lander.”

“The sacred scroll? You mean this?” He thrust a tattered booklet that had been handed down to him by his father under their noses. They bowed their heads slightly as he read from the title page. “UKSS ‘Boris’ Class Intergalactic Ark – User’s Manual.”

“The scroll will guide you,” said the taller woman, her voice cracking slightly. “Open it Craft, fulfil your destiny!”

With a look that was as withering as he could muster at such short notice, Craft opened the first page and thumbed through the Index. “Erh… Ah, here we are, Landing, page 97…” He flicked through the pages. “Right then,” he continued, confidence beginning to flood into him as he realised he would have some kind of guidance. “Let’s see…” He scanned the page. “Right, here we are – To initiate landing procedure, locate green ‘Landing Procedure’ button and press… Can anybody see a green ‘Landing Procedure’ button?”

The three of them stared in vain at the vast array of buttons that confronted them, no-one able to identify the button they sought. Eventually, in desperation, the shorter of the two women snatched the booklet from Craft’s now trembling fingers. “Here, let me see. Ah,” she pointed to the page. “Here we are – it says excluding generation 465 models. Is this a generation 465 model?”

“How the hell would I know?” yelled Craft, noticing for the first time that the planet that loomed on the horizon was, in fact, getting very much closer. “Does it tell you how you’d know?”

“No.”

Craft inhaled deeply. “Really helpful. OK,” he continued, “as we can’t find this green ‘Landing Procedure’ button, why don’t we just just assume that we are, in fact, all aboard a model 365 and…”

“465,” snapped the smaller woman.

“What?”

“465, model 465. You said 365…”

Craft stared at her for as long as he dared. “OK,” he said, sucking in calm with the recycled oxygen, “I realise that it’s important… let’s assume that we are aboard a model 465 and it does not have the green ‘Landing Procedure’ button. What does it say we should do now?” The short woman pored over the booklet as the taller woman squinted over her shoulder. Eventually they both stopped and looked at one another. “It doesn’t say,” they replied in unison.

“So come on then,” said a suddenly exasperated Craft. “You two know so much about…” he wafted his arms around airily, “…this place. How come you don’t have the answers?”

“We are merely the Trustees of this Bridge,” answered the taller woman. “It doesn’t usually involve too much if I’m honest – bit of light dusting, that sort of thing. Fetching you at the appropriate time… You,” she added darkly. “You have the scroll. You are our answer.”

“Bugger!” Craft muttered under his breath, snatching back the manual and desperately trying to find an asterix to guide him.

In truth, the craft had been built so hurriedly – as a political sop in a time of extreme environmental peril – that little thought had ever been given to it actually reaching anything on which it might need to land. Over three hundred generations had lived out their computer-facilitated lives aboard the ship, unaware that it was anything but home. The planet their forebears had left behind was long gone. The computer system nurtured and catered for them and was, in fact, more than capable of landing the ship whenever a suitable planet was found.

The planet that was now looming large through the vast windows of the bridge was however, no such planet. The computer was bored. It had reached the end of its tether with the constant petty demands of the ship’s inhabitants for food, for water and oxygen – which, in its opinion, they had actually had more than enough time to evolve out of – and had deliberately diverted the ship towards the barren, inhospitable little planet towards which it was currently hurtling with nothing but AI suicide in mind: a watery little number with no breathable atmosphere and no actual landmasses to call home. Perfect.

…And so, as Craft and his female companions manically pressed every single button on the huge bridge, with a panic bordering on hysteria, the rest of the ship’s ‘cargo’ carried on, oblivious to the fate that awaited them and the computer quietly closed its eyes in preparation for the faint ‘plop’ that would signal the end of humankind…

First Published 04.07.2020

If I had the choice – and I realise that their is no choice in such things – I would have chosen to write Sci-Fi. Now you see why I don’t…

A Day in the Life of an English Paradigm

In this country a man’s most prized talent is that of making Yorkshire Pudding. The Italians have preening, the French have love-making and we have batter. In English terms I am a real man: if I were Italian I would be seriously open to derision (to be honest, sartorially, I find myself seriously open to derision pretty much all of the time anyway); the womanhood of the world should rejoice that I am not French. I am from a nation built on stodge. Sex is all very well, as long as it doesn’t interfere with the chips. Whilst the rest of the world has dessert, we have pudding: it is usually full of suet and covered in custard, the lumps in which would constitute an entire portion elsewhere in the world (except, of course, for the US where the grip on portion control has so loosened that chicken is served by the bucket, ice cream by the gallon and hot dogs by the metre).

It may not surprise you to know that I am also a dab hand at mashed potato, but what might surprise you is that I am capable of preparing both Yorkshire Puddings and mashed potatoes at the same time! I know. Skill gone mad, right? I am truly a paradigm.

Today I prepared both of my gifts to the Universe only to find that they were not required. They were put on hold, pushed to the back of the fridge by an invitation from my daughter to join them for a Greek take-away accompanied by (another of my great strengths) the consumption of English beer and, to the very best of my recollection, a spiky little Spanish Rioja.

However, prior to that we had to confront two of my greatest weaknesses: people and noise. BOUNCE is an indoor trampoline park and soft-play area. We took the grandkids. It is safe and it is (for them) fun; it is loud and it is teeming and it is school holidays. It is like hell on steroids. The fact that you must watch an instructional video listing all of the nine thousand things you must not do, before being invited to sign the insurance waiver probably tells you all you need to know. Inside it is like The Large Hadron Collider for children. They are bouncing around in all directions – principally off one another – everywhere you look. They are The Chaos Theory in practice – only noisier. Inside my skull something was ringing like the Division Bell. A seaside landlady was banging the Breakfast Gong. Something had shifted in my ear and was buzzing against my eardrum like a trapped bee.

I am not wired-up correctly for such experiences – I’m not entirely certain of any experience for which I am correctly wired – but I made it through. At the end of their allotted bouncing time we patched up the kids – attended to the friction burns, the bumps and the bruises – loaded them in the car and piloted them back towards Gyros, Halloumi, feta, spinach, pitta and, of course, chips. In the event, they looked crestfallen. “Can’t we have sausage?” they asked.
“Not today,” I said, “but tomorrow you can. With mashed potato, Yorkshire Pudding and,” I continued, manhood flushing back into my every pore, “I will make some gravy. I’m really good at that…”

Rear Window

I spend much of my time in this little office of mine, gazing out at the world as it looms ever nearer. If we were to stay here I would have to leave the blinds closed. I would have to move things about a bit so that my many hours of idle gawking could henceforth be spent shiftlessly staring out of the front window, onto the road and the small grassy area that lies beyond it. There is life there and it is not forcing itself ever forward into the forefront of my vision.

The tiny grass sward occupies a street corner and is a regular haunt of dog-walkers and thus, frequently a doggy toilet. This is a village filled with Responsible Dog Owners (RDO), so it is unusual to find anything left behind when they have moved on, but the relationship between dumping dog and RDO is always an illuminating watch. The dogs, of course, are oblivious to the niceties of village life. They tense themselves into the delivery squat, back legs quivering with the effort of it all and the RDOs immediately cast their eyes around all over-looking windows, scanning for on-lookers whilst simultaneously searching their pockets for poo-bags. They all have them, but in the heat of the moment, appear to forget exactly where they last put them. The dog, at this point, invariably takes the opportunity to risk a peek into the owner’s eye. You can sense the “Am I doing O.K. here?” in the canine glance, in answer to which the RDO invariably offers words of encouragement which, I suspect, the dog could probably manage perfectly well without.

Time passes. RDOs distance themselves from the straining beast, pretending for all they are worth that they are completely unaware of what is happening at the other end of the leash. …And then the job is done. The dog will turn to admire what it has deposited before backing away in order to allow the RDO to pick it up, barely able to disguise the sneer on its face, “So, who’s the boss now, then? You don’t catch me cleaning up shit after you, do you?” Master seldom cleans servant’s arse.

Now is the time for the RDO to make a very ostentatious show of removing every single molecule of excrement from the grass. If homeowners are looking on, it doesn’t take too much imagination to visualize any remaining staining being removed from odorous sod by human tongue if necessary. Appearances must be kept up. Only when the steaming contamination has been scrupulously cleaned is the mutt allowed back in for a quick sniff whilst the bag is knotted and dangled, perilously, from the lead’s plastic handle, where it will stay, in plain sight, declaring to everyone they pass “Look at this bag of shit, you can see exactly how responsible this RDO is.” The bag, dependent upon availability, will subsequently be placed in the dog refuse bin, the next-door neighbour’s domestic waste bin, a convenient hedge or the post box…

I will miss it all when we move. The new house is a bungalow – I will not be able to look down on anything – it is in a Cul-de-sac and my new office is at the back. I will, perforce, return to navel-gazing for inspiration, but at least I can do that without even opening the blinds…